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Proposed laws and services aimed at people exhibiting “inappropriate street behavior” make up the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative, to be discussed at a forum Saturday.

The initiative, credited to Mayor Tom Bates, is lauded by some as a program to make commercial areas more appealing to shoppers, but is condemned by others as criminalization of the poor and homeless.

Both views will likely be aired at Saturday’s Public Com-mons for Everyone Initiative Forum, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave.

Those who thought the forum would be an opportunity for dialogue with the mayor may be disappointed, as he is out of the country. Instead, the gathering will be hosted by Lauren Lempert, a consultant hired on a $50,000, six-month contract to seek input from the community on the initiative and to transform the loose set of proposals into laws and services the City Council can address.

Forum participants will be welcomed by Kriss Worthing-ton, acting mayor while Bates is away, who argues that there are already laws in place to address inappropriate street behavior.

He told the Daily Planet on Thursday that he likes the aspect of the initiative that proposes service-oriented solutions. “I will say that the No. 1 priority is: how can we help the homeless and poor people,” he said, adding: “If we do a really good job of getting people into safe and affordable housing, there will be less need for punitive measures.”

Bates’ original proposal included laws prohibiting lengthy sitting on sidewalks, but it’s no longer in the proposal. “We are not touching that,” Lempert said.

Some of the proposals that may be written into the initiative include:

• Eliminating the provision in the law that allows the police to give several warnings before citing people for lying on the street.

• Strictly enforcing laws governing removal of dog feces, hitching animals to fixed objects, littering, public consumption of alcohol, yelling and shouting, restricting use of the sidewalk and parking a bicycle against a window or on a parking meter.

• Restricting smoking in public areas.

• Increasing the fines for public urination and defecation.

Lempert said she hopes to dispel the misconception in the public’s mind that the new laws would target the homeless. “This is not selective enforcement,” she said, noting that she’s “had a lot of conversations with Chief [Doug] Hambleton. He understands the goals,” she said. “We want to uphold everyone’s civil rights, which includes people on the streets and people who want to go shopping or to the Berkeley Rep.”

While there are punitive aspects to the proposal, supporters point to the services the initiative proposes.

These services, however, are dependent on funding. Bates has proposed adding parking meters and raising parking meter fees.

Funds may be used to extend open hours for public bathrooms and add bathroom facilities, Lempert said, underscoring, “We would not do this [ticket people for defecating and urinating] until there were enough public bathrooms in place.”

Downtown Merchants Association Executive Director Deborah Badhia says her organization supports the proposal and will support the meter fee hike. Compared to neighboring cities, Berkeley’s rates are “very reasonable,” she told the Daily Planet on Thursday.

She suggested that the new funds could pay for enhanced services by the city’s Mobile Crisis Team, which interacts with people who are misbehaving on the street and works with the police, calling in uniformed officers only when team members believe public safety is at issue.

The mayor has suggested, as part of the package, that when people are arrested on some of these charges, which are sometimes called “quality of life” offenses, that they be given a choice between paying a fine or taking advantage of an alcohol/drug recovery program.

Critics, however, have suggested that people who hitch their dogs to parking meters or smoke in the “public commons” may not benefit from a program that targets drug abusers. Others have suggested that 12-step programs might not be appropriate for people who do not believe in a Higher Power.

Lempert said she’s looking at a number of service providers, noting that in addition to speaking to Davida Cody of Options Recovery Services (popular with many members of the City Council) she’s talked to Bonita House, which serves people diagnosed with mental illness, and Lifelong Medical Care. “We have not selected one provider over another,” she said.

Other possible services are adding time to when the youth shelter is open. It’s currently funded to stay open only in the winter months.

And “We’re hoping to have more peer-based outreach teams,” Lempert said.

Saturday’s meeting will consist of the welcome by Worthington, a short presentation by city staff, then comment by the public. After an initial opportunity to speak before the large group, public comment will be held in small break-out groups, Lempert said. “That eliminates long lines at the microphone,” she said.

Worthington, however, noted that break-out groups are sometimes used as a “divide and conquer” mechanism, preventing people from hearing directly from others.

A Berkeley man slain by a fusillade of high-powered automatic rifle shots fired from a passing van early Saturday morning had himself been arrested two years earlier as one of six suspects in a similar slaying in Richmond.

Meanwhile, police have issued a bulletin naming a suspect in the weekend’s other murder.

The two killings doubled the city’s homicide toll for the year, with 2007’s four killings matching the total for 2006.

Police and Berkeley firefighters found the lifeless body of Isaac Castro, 37, on the sidewalk outside his home in the 1800 block of Eighth Street in West Berkeley and pronounced him dead at 4:42 a.m.

Though the friend who called police said he thought Castro had fallen down the stairs, police have called the crime a homicide, though they have declined to offer any details.

Berkeley police issued a wanted flyer Wednesday naming Jose Christian Vera Flores as the suspected killer. A day laborer who works throughout the Bay Area, Flores is between 5’6” and 5’10” tall, weighs about 150 pounds and has brown eyes and black hair.

He was born on April 26 in either 1981 or 1982.

Berkeley Police Public Information Officer Sgt. Marty Kusmiss has asked that anyone who has information about Flores to call homicide investigators at 981-5741; anyone seeing him should call 911 immediately.

Drive-by retaliation?

Sgt. Kusmiss said police believe drug dealing may have played a role in the shooting death of 26-year-old Dwayne Murphy, who was gunned down less than 11 hours after firefighters declared Castro dead.

Neighbors told Berkeley police Saturday that Murphy was standing with friends near the corner of 63rd and King in Berkeley when shots rang out from a passing dark blue minivan.

He fell, mortally wounded by several slugs that struck his abdomen. He was rushed to Highland Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The Richmond murders for which he had been arrested two years ago were themselves believed by Richmond detectives to have been retaliation for yet another killing a month before just south of the Berkeley/Oakland border—which they in turn linked to a gang war among groups in Berkeley, Oakland and Richmond.

Murphy was arrested in Berkeley on July 21, 2005, one of six suspects booked on suspicion of killing Sean James McClelland, 26, and LaCorey Rashone Brooks, 22.

Their bodies were found inside a car shortly after midnight on June 27, 2005, after it had crashed into parked vehicles near the corner of Harbor Way and Ripley Avenue in Richmond. Their bodies were riddled by shots fired from at least three different weapons.

Richmond Police Sgt. Allwyn Brown said Murphy was on active parole at the time of his arrest. The officer said Murphy was the member of a West Berkeley gang at the time of the Richmond murders.

Police had been tracking a sometime bloody rivalry between gangs in the two cities.

The six suspects in the Richmond killings were arrested on Ramey Warrants, issued on the basis of sworn statements made to a judge before formal charges have been filed.

Sgt. Brown said no charges were filed in the Richmond murders because the deputy district attorney said “there wasn’t quite enough evidence” to issue the complaints.

No other suspects were ever arrested or charged in those killings.

At the time of the arrests, Richmond Police Lt. Mark Gagan said the shootings were retaliation for the murder a month earlier of Jamon Monty Williams.

The 18-year-old Williams, who worked as an auto detailer, was gunned down near the corner of 60th Street and San Pablo Avenue following an argument outside a nearby liquor store.

He was carrying bindles of crack cocaine in his pocket when he collapsed on the sidewalk outside an auto parts store.

According to a July 21 Richmond police operation order authorizing search warrants at four Berkeley addresses, “The subsequent criminal investigation revealed that the shooting was a retaliatory act carried out by a group of Berkeley criminals who are linked by association to” Williams.

“Our investigation has identified a conspiracy involving at least six identified individuals,” according to the document. “These people are validated gang members, and/or associates—four of six are on active parole.”

Murphy, along with the other five, was released shortly after his arrest. He remained a prime suspect in the killings.

Prior attacks

Sgt. Kusmiss said that “there is a strong likelihood drugs are involved” in Sunday’s drive-by, “based on the strong correlation between drugs and violence in this city.

“We are very, very troubled that someone would use a high-powered rifle, an automatic weapon,” said the sergeant, because the weapons are designed to kill. “We are fortunate that no one else was killed or injured,” she said.

She asked anyone with information on Murphy’s death to call homicide detectives at 981-5741, or the department’s non-emergency all-hours line at 981-5900.

Planning Commissioners Wednesday approved a modified plan and rezoning agenda that will open up the northern end of West Berkeley to car dealerships.

The measures, if approved by the City Council, will allow car dealers into land previously restricted for use by manufacturers, the city’s only M Zone.

Mayor Tom Bates and the city’s Economic Development staff have pushed for the changes because they say they are needed to keep the city’s remaining car retailers from bolting the city, along with the sales tax dollars they generate.

A divided commission also defeated a measure that would have exempted from rezoning the long, nine-acre block occupied by the city’s largest concentration of recycling efforts—opting instead for a compromise to ensure new and relocated dealerships wouldn’t interfere with recycling efforts.

The proposal by Helen Burke to exempt the block between Gilman Street on the south and the city’s Albany border on the north from Second to Third streets from the rezoning failed on 4-4 tie vote, with Chair James Samuels deciding the measure by his abstention.

Instead, commissioners adopted the compromise proposed by Roia Ferrazares after Principal Planner Debra Sanderson cautioned that the move “would reduce the ability of the city to manage its own property to maximize its options.”

“We don’t have any authority to prevent the city from selling,” said Commissioner Harry Pollack. “The city has a right to sell its property.”

Nonetheless, Sanderson said, “I see no evidence the city is interested in undoing the Transfer Station and recycling center.”

Only Burke voted against the Ferrazares’ motion, which was to include in the rezoning a proviso that the measure “will not materially interfere with the activities” of the transfer station and recycling facilities.”

Burke left minutes later.

In the end, commissioners voted 7-0-1 to approve the amendments, with Patti Dacey abstaining.

Passionate pleas

The meeting began with impassioned pleas from West Berkeley artisans and recyclers.

John Curl, chair of the West Berkeley Artisans and Industrial Companies (WEBAIC), urged the commission to include mitigations whenever car dealers appeared in the zone.

When the West Berkeley Plan was adopted, he said, mitigations were required whenever sites in other zones were transformed to other uses. “These are left out of the M zone because there were no other permitted uses,” he said.

Steven Jensen of the city’s Zero Waste Commission said he was concerned about the potential impacts on recycling businesses, and said he was glad that the site of Urban Ore—the city’s largest private recycling/reuse business—had been removed from the planned rezoning.

Commissioners earlier this month exempted a second block of property proposed for rezoning at the southern end of West Berkeley along the southern margins of Ashby Avenue west of San Pablo after activists and the owners of Ashby Lumber, which occupies part of the site, along with Urban Ore voiced their concerns.

Urban Ore co-founder Mary Lou Van De Venter, speaking also on behalf of the Northern California Recycling Association, called for protections for Berkeley’s “green producers.”

With the City Council official adopting a “zero waste” goal for the community, the city needs manufacturing zoning to handle all the tonnage of recycling for production uses, she said.

While she urged the commission to restrict the rezoned area to relocating dealerships already in the city, commissioners rejected the notion because Sanderson said it could pose legal problems.

Nancy Gorrell, who serves on the board of the Community Conservation Center, and spouse Mark Gorrell, an Ecology Center board member, urged the commission to rescind the measure to preserve the city’s growing recycling industry.

Ecology Center Executive Director Martin Bourque told commissioners that American recycling has overtaken the auto industry in size, in part because of overseas carmakers and in part because of the rapid growth of recycling.

His own center, he said, employs 10 to 15 union workers, saves millions of gallons of water a year, tons of carbon and hundreds of thousands of trees while saving taxpayers many thousands of dollars.

He said he was very concerned about the potential impact on the city’s recycling businesses should the city decide to sell the transfer station block, and urged its exemption from the rezoning.

David Isaac Tam, a member of the Zero Waste Commission and a representative of the Sustainability, Parks Recycling and Wildlife Legal Defense Fund, charged that the city’s environmental impact statement and the accompanying mitigated negative declaration prepared along with the proposal were both legally insufficient. He too urged exemption of the long block from the rezoning.

“I see no reason that the nine acres should even be considered,” said Rick Auerbach of WEBAIC, who said he was also concerned about existing businesses along the freeway frontage road in the M zone.

He urged the addition of language that would exempt the properties occupied by Alameda County Computer Recycling Center and a paper-shredding business.

Changes made

Commissioners did amend the measure they had adopted two weeks earlier, removing used-car lots and truck and motorcycle sales as well as boat and recreational vehicles sales from the district—while adding provisions to allow the sale of restored classic cars that would have otherwise been banned along with other used-car dealerships.

Pickup trucks, a staple of new-car dealerships, are permitted, along with used-car sales incidental to a new-car dealership’s business.

While Commissioner Susan Wengraf wanted to include used-car sales “because it’s a form of recycling,” colleague Gene Poschman pointed to the proliferation of used-car lots along San Pablo Avenue.

The changes still allow new-car dealers to sell used cars as part of their businesses.

Poschman, who reluctantly voted for the Ferrazares compromise, said he was concerned that city was surrendering to a neo-liberal agenda, “thinking that market conditions are the reference point for decisions in public policy.”

Commissioners will have one final pass at the measure next month when they will review the redrafted plan and zoning amendments to make certain the changes they approved Wednesday night are clearly expressed..

The courtroom battle over UC Berkeley’s stadium-area building boom pitted the city’s hired legal gun in a Tuesday showdown against the university’s own sharpshooter-for-hire.

When the smoke cleared, both were still standing, awaiting the next round a week hence.

The courtroom maneuvers now underway in the Hayward courtroom of Alameda County Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Miller are scheduled to end on Oct. 11 with closing arguments.

Then it’s up to the judge, who is expected to rule sometime in the following 90 days.

Harriet A. Steiner represents the city in its battle with the university. A shareholder in the prominent Sacramento law firm of McDonough Holland & Allen, she also serves as city attorney for another UC host community: Davis.

It was as the legal advocate for Davis that she submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in a landmark case that held California universities need to mitigate the impacts of new development on surrounding communities.

City of Marina and Fort Ord Reuse Authority v. Board of Trustees of the California State University has been hailed as a major victory for local governments struggling with the impacts of growth by agencies that are literally laws unto themselves.

In that case, the state Supreme Court held that mitigations were required under the California Environmental Quality Act, one of two laws being used to challenge UC Berkeley’s stadium area projects.

Her courtroom opponent, Charles R. Olson, is one of the two founding principals of Sanger & Olson, a San Francisco law firm specializing in real estate law.

In addition to the University of California, the firm’s clients include the elite Starwood Hotels chain, the John Stewart Company, West Bay Builders and Pier 39, as well as the Salvation Army and the National Farm Workers Service Center.

Olson is also representing the university in other cases challenging its development plans in Berkeley, and served as legal counsel to the university for preparation of its Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) 2020.

That document and its accompanying environmental impact report (EIR) are playing leading roles in the current dispute over the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects (SCIP).

Disclosure issues

One of the key legal questions Judge Miller must decide is just what information the university must disclose about its projects and their impacts, and to what level and in what form.

Olson contends the university met all its obligations in “tiered” environmental impact reports prepared both for the LRDP and the SCIP projects—which include, besides the four-story stadium-side gym and office complex renovations to the stadium, an underground parking lot, and a new office and meeting complex joining the nearby law and business schools.

While Steiner said there was nothing wrong with including multiple projects in an EIR, “you have to make sure you’re doing a project-level EIR” for each development.

“This EIR lacks that kind of project-level description.” she said, referring to the document prepared for the SCIP projects.

As for the Student Athlete High Performance Center, “from the very get-go they stepped forward on the wrong foot” by offering vague descriptions of the project and its impacts and by failing to provide well-reasoned alternatives.

“They told the public, this is your one shot to address the impacts and mitigations” of all the projects.

Steiner charged that the stadium projects EIR failed to adequately address the potential impacts of building in an earthquake hazard zone (a definition from the Alquist-Priolo Act, which governs construction in seismic hazard areas) “next to a known fault” which “will most likely” be the source of a major earthquake “within our lifetimes.”

One issue raised repeatedly by the plaintiffs—who also include City Councilmember Dona Spring, the Panoramic Hill Association and the California Oak Foundation—is whether or not the EIR’s impact findings are valid if, in fact, the university finds it can’t do the major renovations and retrofit plans for Memorial Stadium, which straddles the Hayward Fault.

While Olson acknowledged that “even with mitigation,” the hazards of bringing people to a fault “cannot be reduced to less than significant and remains significant and unavoidable,” the stadium work would make things safer for the university, stadium users and the surrounding neighbors.

But the question for the judge is, can the work be done?

Alquist-Priolo limits new work on buildings within 50 feet of an active fault to half of their value.

But is “value” the market price of the existing building or the cost of building a new one? And does the 50 percent limitation apply to seismic retrofits?

And what about work needed to make the stadium compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)?

Olson, the university’s lawyer, argues that retrofit and ADA costs shouldn’t count and that replacement cost, not market value, should be the governing baseline.

Not so, say Steiner and the other plaintiffs. And if the stadium work can’t be done, they argue, the threat of collapse would endanger access by emergency workers and escape by residents of Panoramic Hill and other neighborhoods.

And given the uncertainty of the future of the stadium, why build a gym immediately adjacent to it, one that could be pummeled by debris from a quake-ravaged stadium?

And is the gym itself a potentially unlawful addition or alteration to the stadium, and thus to be counted toward the 50 percent Alquist-Priolo limit? A judge must come up with answers to this question and more.

Judge Miller again reminded Olson that the courts are obliged to follow common ordinary definitions in applying the law, which could limit the building’s value to its sale price rather than its replacement cost.

“I don’t necessarily agree that case law gets us to that point,” Olson said.

And as for safety, Olson said provisions for moving temporary restroom and concession facilities now sited on game day on a temporarily closed Stadium Rimway along the eastern wall to new permanent spaces beneath the east banks of seating would clear the road for traffic, making the area safer.

Unlike EIRs for single projects, which are individual documents that stand alone, the university’s projects are “tiered off” more comprehensive EIRs. The SCIP is itself tiered off the EIR for the 2020 LRDP’s EIR—the source of much of the information without which the SCIP’s own EIR can’t be understood.

Olson acknowledged that the combined project EIRs tiered off from LRDPs were “unusual but not illegal.”

Twice before, he said, UC Berkeley had adopted a similar tactic—in the case of the Southside projects which include Underhill parking structure and other buildings and with the so-called Nexus bioscience projects on the north side of the campus, tiered off from the 1990 LRDP and its EIR.

But the plaintiffs are challenging the adequacy of both EIRs, particularly the broader 2020 LRDP document, which covers not only the entire campus area but plans for expansion into downtown Berkeley as well.

The end result of the complex process is represented by the 17 boxes stacked along the edge of the jury box, filled with 198 “volumes,” some consisting of two of more binders—45,000 pages of documentation.

In the current battle, Berkeley’s largest developer is also its own regulatory agency—with only the courts offering the hope of recourse.

Olson said additional review will be undertaken if any substantial changes are made to the projects or if new information surfaces to suggest the environmental impacts may be different from those set forth in the EIR, possibly leading to a supplemental report or an addendum.

Court will resume Tuesday morning.

Meanwhile, a day earlier and in a Fremont courtroom not far away, Superior Court Judge Richard Keller will be hearing another case which focuses on the same gym site that has so consumed the legal talent in Judge Miller’s courtroom.

UC Berkeley will be presenting its case for a court order ending the ongoing tree-sit at the grove along the stadium’s western wall, where protesters took up residence in the branches on Big Game day last December.

During a hearing Sept. 12, the judge refused the university’s bid for a temporary restraining order that would have given the university the court’s backing to clear the branches.

That hearing begins at 2:30 p.m.

Judge Miller herself will pay a visit to the site next Thursday, scheduling her visit from 2 to 6 p.m., so she can see firsthand what all the fuss is about.

Fulani Offuti has been an hourly worker in the Parks and Recreation Department for 11 years, working most recently in James Kenney Park’s inclusionary program, where disabled and able-bodied children are integrated into recreation activities.

After working in the summer program, Offuti anticipated employment as usual in the after-school program, but two weeks before the fall program was to begin, Offuti and six of her co-workers received letters announcing they would be offered no hours in the fall and spring.

“I was shocked,” Offuti told the Daily Planet outside the Parks and Recreation Commission meeting Monday evening. The week before receiving the “no hours” memo, the six hourly workers in the inclusionary program and one worker in the regular after-school program had been asked by their supervisor to turn in a schedule of their availability, leading all to believe they would be working in the fall after-school program, as many had done for years.

City administrators argue, however, that these hourly workers are “at will” employees and have no particular right to work.

The workers and their supporters—some 15 people, including parks department staff, employees from other city departments, Service Employee International Union 1021 officials and parents of children in the program—attended the commission meeting.

Lisa Hesselgesser, a city library worker and union shop steward, addressed the commission. “It’s a flagrant disregard of people whose children are in the program,” she said. “It’s not just happening to workers—it’s happening to the kids.”

After hearing speakers during the

public-comment period, Scott Ferris, commission secretary and youth and recreation services manager in the parks department, responded to Commissioner Joe Gross, who had asked for an explanation: “In large part, it’s a personnel issue and I can’t comment,” Ferris said. “We have done some reorganization at James Kenney. Seven staff members are no longer receiving hours.”

The city and union interpret their Memorandum of Understanding with the hourly workers differently, with the union arguing that hourly employees have seniority rights, and the city saying they do not.

Some hourly employees who had worked less time with the city than those who received no hours were rehired for the fall program. “They offered jobs to two people who had just worked for the summer,” SEIU 1021 Field Team Supervisor Andre Spearman told the Daily Planet, in an interview in the hallway outside the commission meeting.

Spearman argued further that the city ought to have met with the union before denying the workers hours, but city officials say no such meeting is necessary, given the hourly employees’ “at will”

status.

In a phone interview Tuesday, Deputy City Manager Lisa Caronna said that only “career” employees—those working 20-to-30 hours during the year and 40 hours during the summer—are protected by seniority requirements.

“Hourly employees work on call as needed,” Caronna said. After working 520 hours, they get some paid time off. “Hourly employees are hourly employees. They are people who fill in for the needs of the program in recreation, sports, tutoring. They are hourly at will. They do not have seniority rights.”

Caronna went on to say that picking the people “most effective for the program is at the discretion of management.”

SEIU officials, however, argue that the agreement between the union and workers does not specifically reference “at will” employment.

In a Thursday morning e-mail to the Planet, Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Director William Rogers defended the decision not to offer the hours. With new supervisory staff, the adult to child ratio in the inclusionary program is more than one staff member for every two children and “is consistent with the ratio we have had in the past,” he said, noting that in the regular program, attendance has “decreased dramatically,” requiring a smaller staff.

James Wells, president of the part-time staff union and part time “career” employee at James Kenney, argued to the contrary. In an interview outside the Parks Commission meeting, he told the Planet that he’s found himself in the position of pushing two wheelchairs at once and has not been able to find a second staffer to help move a physically disabled student out of his wheelchair for toileting purposes.

Rogers characterized Wells’ description as a “misrepresentation.” “At no time do we require one staff member to push two wheelchairs,” he wrote.

Anthony Jacob attended the Monday night meeting out of concern for the workers and for his 10-year-old autistic son, who attends the inclusionary program.

“Staff is there with my kid while I’m at people being cut back, I’m concerned for the welfare of my kid.”

Rogers said in his e-mail that new senior staff enhances the quality of the program. “Instead of just watching the kids, we are providing new opportunities for learning and socialization,” he wrote.

Responding in a phone call to the Planet, Wells pointed to various activities planned and modified for disabled children by hourly staff, including an Amtrak train trip to Sacramento that gave the disabled children and many of their able-bodied peers an experience none had previously had.

The workers say the elimination of hours was bad enough, but even worse was the way the long-term workers were advised their services were no longer needed. The two-sentence letter signed August 17 by Scott Ferris said that staffing needs had changed for the 2007-2008 year. “As a result, we do not anticipate scheduling you for hours between September 2007 and June 2008,” the letter said.

Rogers responded to the criticism, writing: “A letter went to staff who were not going to be scheduled as professional courtesy.”

Caronna was more conciliatory: “It certainly seems that these people were caught off guard,” she said. “Better communication would not have hurt the situation.”

More than 25 uniformed Berkeley police officers crowded into a courtroom today for opening statements in the trial of a man accused of attempting to murder Berkeley police Officer Darren Kacalek more than two years ago.

Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Michael Nieto told jurors that Howard Street shot Kacalek, now 31, in the chest with a handgun and fired another shot that grazed Kacalek’s hairline on May 17, 2005, when the officer chased Street as he fled from officers who tried to stop him for speeding with a stolen car.

Nieto said Street, a 38-year-old Berkeley resident, is charged with six felonies and said that in April and May of 2005 Street was “a one-man crime wave who was out of control.”

Nieto said that Street is also accused of first-degree residential burglary, carjacking and assault with a firearm in connection with the May 5, 2005, robbery and shooting of 50-year-old Gerald Sims in an Oakland motel room.

Street also faces two counts of being an ex-felon in possession of a firearm.

Authorities say that Street previously has been convicted of possession of firearms, robbery and drug sales and escaped police custody in 1990 and 1997.

At over 25 meetings held during two days this past week, parents, teachers, students and community members showed up to question, comment and prophesy on the role of the new superintendent who will replace current Berkeley Unified School District superintendent Michel Lawrence in February.

“We want someone who will be a combination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and Mother Teresa,” said one parent.

Tempers flew over the short notice provided to the community for their input, and the dismal turnout at some meetings led to criticism of the Berkeley Board of Education.

Andy McComb, from Berkeley Organizing Congregations for Action (BOCA), said that the community was not getting enough time to voice their opinion.

“The board is missing the opportunity to discuss the real issues with the community,” he said.

“You have to fight to get information about these meetings. The process is far too short. It’s so closed, so tight that it’s very dissatisfying.”

Berkeley Federation of Teachers president Cathy Campbell said she had grave concerns about the process.

“It’s really a pity that the board is squandering an opportunity to educate and involve the community,” she said after her meeting with Leadership Associates, the consultants hired to recruit a superintendent, on Monday.

“They have made it clear that it’s going to be a decision of five people.”

Some community groups and parents who turned up for the meetings Monday and Tuesday said there had been no general knowledge of the process.

“You were lucky you got an e-mail,” Campbell said. “Even that looked like a piece of junk mail. The average parent had no knowledge that there was a meeting going on. It’s a sign that the board has chosen to have a very closed process.”

After Lawrence announced her retirement on Sept. 11, the board hired Leadership Associates and prepared a recruitment timeline in less than a week.

After boardmembers view the report from the meetings next week, they will be made available to the public, said district spokesperson Mark Coplan.

“It was definitely short notice and planned within a couple of weeks,” Coplan acknowledged Tuesday, “but we only have a certain amount of time to go through the procedure,” he said.

“Fifty organizations were sent invitations through a combination of letters and e-mail. It’s impossible to talk to every person in the district in two days.”

Robert Trigg of Leadership Associates said that although it was a tight timeline it wasn’t an unusual one.

Coplan added that some people had misunderstood the meetings.

“A lot of people spoke about the changes they want to see in the district.” he said. “The consultants wanted to know what characteristics the community wants the new superintendent to have. In spite of that we were able to get a lot of great input. Some people came with very specific lists.”

At Berkeley High School (BHS), the only student leadership group that came forward to talk to the consultants was Youth Together.

“There were no announcements,” said Jiro Ignacio Palmieri, a BHS senior who was representing the student group.

Coplan said that letters had been distributed to each of the leadership groups at BHS.

“The question is how many of them would skip break or stay after school to discuss the new superintendent,” he said. “Not an awful lot of students are thinking about what they want to see in the new superintendent.”

“I have never seen the superintendent at all,” said Ahmina James, a sophomore who attended the meeting.

“They need to come and visit the classrooms. A lot of students are accused of having Attention Deficit Disorder, but if kids were encouraged to join groups like Youth Together or go to Youth Court and discuss issues, that would really help.”

Participants in the different meetings repeatedly stressed the importance of the new superintendent’s closing the achievement gap and promoting diversity.

Nkauj Iab Yang, site organizer for Youth Together, said that the issue of achievement gap and race went hand in hand.

“Students from very privileged backgrounds and disadvantaged backgrounds are competing against each other. So what will the superintendent do to reduce the gap?”

“Lots of people will say I want to do something about the achievement gap,” Trigg, who was coordinating the meeting, said.

“The question is what will you do to reduce the achievement gap? It takes more than just speaking from the heart.”

Around 15 people turned up for the meeting with the district’s staff and teachers.

“We want the new superintendent to solve the most critical problem in the state right now,” said Martin Luther King Jr. elementary school retired music teacher Jesse Anthony.

“That is, closing the gap between blacks, Latino and white students. No school district I have known so far has solved it. Whichever school district comes up with the tools to do it will be the major school district in the country.”

Recruiting teachers of color, said Malcolm X teacher Dale Long, was one of the ways of tackling it.

“It’s really an equity gap,” he said. “Minorities are well represented in early childhood development. The divide starts from K-12. We need a superintendent who changes that immediately.”

All the teachers in the room pointed out that the majority of students in California would be children of color in a few years.

“There are zero African American and Latino science teachers at Berkeley High,” said Dorothy Liu, who teaches science at BHS.

“If you think that doesn’t affect students of color you are wrong.”

“We need more African American staff, and not just janitors,” said Nina Livingston, a parent.

“We need teachers and instructors ... The board is hiring teachers who don’t understand our children. Just because our skin is the kind of color it is doesn’t mean we are stupid.”

Trigg stressed that although achievement gap was one of the important issues in the selection process, it wasn’t the only one.

“This is an extra sophisticated, complicated and political district,” he said.

“It’s a challenging job and there are fewer candidates than ever in this field ... The superintendent who comes here has to be thick-skinned. You don’t get praised much, but you get criticized.”

Campbell stressed that in order to really address the issues of excellence and achievement for all students in Berkeley it was important that the new superintendent have experience working with the classified unions and the teachers.

“We have built some great buildings, got our finances in order,” she said. “It’s time to focus on kids of color who are not doing so well ... collaborate with teachers to find ways to address that.”

BOCA highlighted the importance of dual immersion programs.

“My congregation is vastly Latino,” said Father George Crespin from St. Joseph the Worker Church.

“The number of dropouts and E’s and F’s has remained the same for a long time now. And the number of personnel who look like the kids is small. The reality is that half of our kids do not do well in the school system and the longer they study in the school district they do worse. Statistics show that their GPA goes down each year in high school. Our children are in a crisis situation.”

Input about the new superintendent can be sent to 23052-H Alicia Parkway, Mission Viejo, California. More information can be found at www.leadershipassociates.org.

Photograph by Riya Bhattacharjee

Bob Trigg, former superintendent of the Elk Grove school district and one of the consultants from Leadership Associates, talks to student leaders from Youth Together about the superintendent search process in the Berkeley High School library Monday.

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board member Chris Kavanagh pleaded not guilty today to five felony counts stemming from allegations that his real home is in Oakland and that he falsely claims he lives in Berkeley in order to hold office and collect city benefits there.

Kavanagh, who was dressed in blue jeans and a blue shirt at his brief hearing today, is scheduled to return to Alameda County Superior Court on Oct. 26 to have a preliminary hearing date set.

He declined to talk to news reporters today. Approached by a television crew outside court before his hearing began, he denied that his name is Chris Kavanagh.

His attorney, James Giller, said Kavanagh plains to remain on the Rent Stabilization Board and he’s confident he can prove that Kavanagh is a Berkeley resident, even though prosecutors allege that his true residence is a cottage on 63rd Street in Oakland.

Kavanagh was first elected to the Berkeley Rent Board in 2002 and was re-elected to a second four-year term last November.

Rent board executive director Jay Kelekian has said he and the board don’t have the authority to remove Kavanagh and could only take such an action if he’s convicted.

During his campaign last year, Kavanagh signed a disclosure form stating that he lived at an apartment at 2709 Dwight Way in Berkeley. Earlier this year, he told the rent board that his mail should be sent to 2707 Webster St. in Berkeley, which is a post office address.

Kelekian said he’s heard that Kavanagh has listed a Bancroft Way address as his residence more recently.

Code Pink took to the streets of Berkeley Wednesday to try to drive the U.S. Marine Recruitment Center out of the city.

Donning pink hats, T-shirts and badges, a group of 10 braved rush-hour traffic on Shattuck Avenue to protest against the recruitment office located at 64 Shattuck Square.

“If there are to be no wars, there can be no warriors,” said Dianne Budd, one of the organizers.

“We found out a few days ago and decided to make their lives miserable,” she said, pinning up “RECRUITERS LIE, CHILDREN DIE” posters on the office windows. “We want people to know that it’s here and we want to shut them down. If people had been in there we were ready to hand out information about GI rights. We just want to speak the truth.”

Budd said that the group had planned the demonstration after noticing the office on the block, and its proximity to UC Berkeley and Berkeley High School.

The recruitment office was closed when the Planet reached the site at 5 p.m. Wednesday and no one was available for comment before press time.

According to Shahin, owner of the Z&S salon located next door, the recruitment center has been there since January.

“I have seen people coming here during the day five days a week,” she said. “It’s not a lot but they go in and out and some have uniforms.”

As Budd and her fellow organizers held a pink banner with “No military predators in our town” written on it, hundreds of cars, buses and trucks honked their support and waved.

“It’s pretty brazen to put it up here,” said disabled people’s activist Dan McMullen as he passed by.

“I think they are wasting their time. Not too many people are going to sign up.”

“They never came back from the war the same,” he said looking at the posters. “I guess the governement is building up the pressure. A couple of months ago the feds ordered Berkeley High to follow their opt-out policy. They are trying hard to recruit people.”

Berkeley High was recently threatened with federal-fund cuts unless they followed the federal opt-out policy, which allows the military to access students’ personal information for recruitment purposes unless they deliberately opt out of the process.

Marge Lasky, a member of Grandmothers Against the War, said she had no idea that the office was there.

“I am pretty shocked it’s here,” she said. “Why would the marines come into the belly of the beast? Either they are really desperate for recruitment or they think they can get people by being near Berkeley High and the university.”

Kali Steel from Code Pink said the group would protest in front of the office every Wednesday until it was shut down.

Berkeley still has a long way to go before it can eliminate health inequalities, according to city officials who spoke at Tuesday’s Community Action Forum at St. Paul AME Church.

Numbers came to life as community members spoke about real-life instances and discussed ways to battle existing demographic divides along racial, ethnic and social lines.

Linda Rudolph, the city’s health officer, highlighted the positives and negatives of the city of Berkeley’s 2007 Health Status Report and outlined the ongoing action taking place to help citizens.

“There is a large disparity between races,” she said. “African Americans have the highest death rates in all categories. A lot of diseases people are dying from can be prevented by healthy eating and exercise. People really need to focus on their diets.”

City Manager Phil Kamlarz said that a number of relevant trends hadn’t changed since the last report.

“The question is how we will continue this discussion,” he said. “Work together to find different answers to different things. The statistics show that Berkeley is healthy, but why don’t African Americans have some of the same numbers as whites? We need to keep developing strategies to deal with blood pressure, hypertension, poverty and diet.”

The forum—which attracted more than a hundred people—was also attended by Alameda County superintendent Keith Carson, councilmembers Max Anderson, Darryl Moore and Kriss Worthington, who is acting as vice-mayor while Mayor Tom Bates is in England.

Rudolf said that grave disparities in the 1999 Health Report led to the formation of a Community Action Team in 2000 which had established a lot of good models in Southwest Berkeley.

“The single most important challenge is health and equity,” she said. “Prenatal care has really improved in Berkeley in the last ten years. The gap between blacks, Latinos and whites in getting prenatal care has gone away completely. ”

Rudolph added that the Health Department’s first priority was to pay attention to young children.

“We believe that every child deserves a healthy start,” she told community members.

“Many low-income children are still obese and in addition to that, a lot of youth in the city are using tobacco, alcohol and marijuana. We know there is a problem with fighting high rates of youth violence ... It’s important to make sure every teen has an opportunity to build a healthy lifestyle.”

The report stated that about two-thirds of all deaths in the city were from heart and circulatory diseases, cancer and stroke. About a third are caused by tobacco, poor diet and physical disabilities, it said.

“Overall Berkeley has a low rate of hypertension, but it’s twelve times as high in African Americans as in whites,” she said.

Heart disease and diabetes are also higher for African Americans and Latinos than for whites, she said.

“One-hundred-and-fifty deaths of people in poor neighborhoods can be avoided if these people had the same mortality level as whites,” Rudolph said.

“If we don’t address segregation, if we don’t address the social environment, we cannot influence these risk factors,” she said.

“You are outlining all the problems and not addressing anything,” said George Pearson, who works as a physician’s assistant in Berkeley.

“In January 2006 there was a discussion on the same subject ... The studies keep happening, but adverse outcomes are still adverse outcomes.”

Rudolph replied that it was important to address the different health challenges through data.

“We hope we can see more progress but we are going to keep working on the data,” she said.

She also informed the community about the new Hypertension Clinic in South Berkeley which was opened to address high-risk symptoms leading to stroke and diabetes.

Councilmember Darryl Moore spoke about the Be Fit Berkeley program—a neighborhood competition where residents could earn points by losing weight and exercising regularly—which will be launched in October.

“The report shows that we have made some progress in dealing with low infancy birth rates and new programs but to see really significant change is long term ... probably decades,” said Julie Sinai, senior aide to the mayor.

“The more we can get people on the same page and keep them motivated, the better. Incremental changes are important.”

Photograph by Riya Bhattacharjee.

At Tuesday’s Community Action Forum, teen mother and Berkeley City College student Rocky Smith recounts the story of how she was evicted by her landlord when her baby was three months old. The forum focused on the city’s newly released 2007 Health Report.

One of the two students who were injured in a series of unrelated accidents at Berkeley High Wednesday was back in the classroom Thursday, said Berkeley Unified School District spokesperson Mark Coplan.

The school grounds were abuzz with activity around 11:15 a.m. Wednesday when three medical emergencies occurred within half an hour of each other.

The Communication Arts & Sciences (CAS) small school was having an organized team-building exercise at Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center park when two students circling the group miscalculated and ran into each other, bumping heads.

After one of the students complained of neck pain, vice principal Maggie Heredia-Peltz, who was with the group, called for medical assistance.

The student was taken to Highland Hospital by paramedics and CAS teacher Phil Halpern and was back at school Thursday.

Coplan told the Planet that the other two students were also expected to be back at school.

He said that the paramedics had also found a student in the bushes adjacent to the H buiding across from the park who complained that he had suffered injuries after falling from a second-floor window.

The student was also taken to Highland Hospital, where doctors found no injuries.

Coplan said that although there were many speculations that the student had jumped or had been pushed from the window, no witnesses had come forward to confirm it.

At the same time, another student reported to the health center with chest pains. An ambulance was called to transport the student to Children’s Hospital for further testing and observation.

The wisdom of Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums’ policy of keeping his distance from the politics of the Oakland City Council gets its first real test this Tuesday when the council considers Dellums’ appointments to the powerful Port of Oakland Board of Commissioners.

It will also be a test of the mayor’s ability to fulfill his promise to bring formerly unrepresented sections of the Oakland community into the halls of power of the Oakland government.

Last fall, while he was still mayor-elect, Dellums resisted calls from some of his supporters to support anti-war activist and Green Party member Aimee Allison in her runoff race against incumbent District 2 Councilmember Pat Kernighan, saying that District 2 voters were qualified to choose their own representative without his help. Following the election, which Kernighan won, Dellums then refused to intervene in attempts to challenge the re-election of District 3 Councilmember Ignacio De La Fuente as president of the Council.

Now, De La Fuente stands as the reported center of opposition to Dellums’ nomination of West Oakland environmental activist Margaret Gordon to one of two Port Commission seats, while Kernighan is considered one of the key swing votes that could either put Gordon on the commission or keep her off.

With five votes needed on the eight-member council, Gordon’s confirmation to replace Commissioner David Kramer, now scheduled for the Tuesday, Oct. 2 Council meeting, is considered too close to call.

Gordon’s nomination was originally scheduled to be voted on by the council just prior to the summer break, but Dellums postponed the vote shortly before the council meeting after determining that he did not have more than four firm votes for confirmation. The mayor also pulled a second Port Commission nominee, IBEW Local 595 Business Manager Victor Uno, but Uno’s confirmation is not considered to be a problem.

The battle over Gordon’s nomination comes at a time when issues she has long been advocating—improving Oakland’s air quality and the health of its citizens—are at the forefront of Port of Oakland concerns.

According to Gordon’s bio, the Richmond native, who grew up in San Francisco and later relocated to Oakland, co-founded and co-directs the West Oakland Environmental Indicators

Project (WOEIP), a state- and federally-funded advocacy group that “works with neighborhood organizations, physicians, researchers, and public officials to ensure West Oakland residents have a clean environment, safe neighborhoods, and access to economic opportunity. In 2006, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognized WOEIP for its ‘work to improve local air quality.’”

This past Wednesday, East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE), as part of the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, issued a report calling for the elimination of indepen-dent truck contracting at the Port of Oakland in order to “reduce pollution and ensure economic growth.” The report “Taking The Low Road” says that truck pollution at the port and in the surrounding areas is having a devastating health effect on the truck drivers themselves and on West Oakland residents, with Alameda County Department of Public Health Director Dr. Anthony Iton writing in the foreword that “residents living in the shadow of the Port of Oakland can expect to die, on average, more than a decade before residents of the Oakland Hills,” mostly due to asthma-related health conditions. But with independent truckers financially unable to upgrade their vehicles, the report suggests that the port contract with established trucking companies and then require them to meet stricter environmental and work condition standards.

Port officials are considering the group’s recommendations.

On Thursday, Gordon and other local business leaders, environmental and community activists and city and port staff members met at the Jack London Aquatic Center on the Oakland estuary to continue work on the port’s Mari-time Air Quality Improvement Plan (MAQIP). Port and local health officials and activists are hoping that, when it is completed, MAQIP will be a roadmap for the port to “reduce the adverse public health impacts of the Port of Oakland’s seaport-related air emissions at the seaport area and in the neighboring communities,” as well as to allow the port to tap into recently passed state infrastructure bond monies to make improvements at the port facilities.

Gordon, along with Port Executive Director Omar Benjamin and Bay Area Air Quality Management District Director Jack Broadbent, is one of the three-co-chairs for the MAQIP task force, a tribute to how well she is respected in dealing with health-related port issues.

In between task force sessions on Thursday, Gordon said that she believes that if she is confirmed by Oakland City Council, she will bring a needed new perspective to the Port Commission.

“I’ll be bringing the experience of a community that other Commissioners don’t see, they don’t smell, they don’t hear,” she said. “I can tell them about the trucks riding up on the sidewalks in West Oakland and cracking the pavement where residents have to walk, or idling under people’s bedroom windows, or the dust and dirt and soot they leave behind them on the sides of houses, or the smoke billowing out of ships that comes over into our neighborhood, or the mothers sitting up with their kids hacking and coughing all night, or the people missing work because of respiratory problems.”

But Gordon, who has asthma herself and who has five of 11 grandchildren who also suffer from the ailment, says that as well as alerting the port to problems, she can bring with her long-established contacts that can help smooth the way to solutions.

“There’s no other current commissioner who has the contacts with state and federal and local environmental health officials that I have,” Gordon said, “with the Environmental Protection Agency, with the California Air Resources Board, with the California Department of Health. I’ve been dealing with these agencies for years. I know many of their employees on a first-name basis. I can help the commission understand these agencies’ concerns so that the commission can meet these environmental and health standards, and as a Port Commissioner, I can help the agencies understand the port’s concerns.

She said that with increasing national consciousness on health and environmental issues, every port will have to meet increasingly stringent standards, adding that facing that challenge and meeting those environmental and health standards early will make the Port of Oakland more competitive, not less. She believes that her presence on the commission would help that process.

It is difficult to determine the exact nature of the opposition to Gordon’s nomination, aside from the fact that Port Commissioners have traditionally been business-oriented, and that there may be some jockeying by Dellums opponents on the Council who would like to see portions of the mayor’s agenda fail. One of things you hear about Gordon is that she may be too “blunt” to serve on the Commission.

She is certainly plain-spoken. On Thursday, after some port representatives, including Executive Director Benjamin, expressed concerns that any health and environmental standards should take into account the port’s need to stay competitive with other west coast ports, Gordon said pointedly, “I don’t see the balance. I see the port continuing to grow at the airport and at its maritime facilities, but I don’t see you meeting your responsibilities with regards to the health concerns of the city. I’d like to see a clear financial analysis of how those standards would hurt the growth of the port.”

But she also added that it was unfair for the port to foot the whole bill for raising environmental and health standards, when area businesses are contributing little or nothing but benefiting from the nearby presence of the port facilities.

“I’d like to see what our local businesses and industries will commit to this effort,” she said. “Let’s be real. The rubber’s hitting the road, now.”

Today (Friday, September 28) is the last day for eligible persons to put their applications in the mail for the two available units of Berkeley’s public housing, Berkeley Housing Authority Director Tia Ingram reminded the BHA board at its Wednesday evening meeting.

Noting that 17 people had mistakenly hand-delivered applications to the BHA office, Ingram said these people must resubmit the applications by mail. All applications must be postmarked by today, Sept. 28.

BHA received three applications postmarked before Sept. 24; they are ineligible. (Those applicants can resubmit the applications as long as they are postmarked by today, Ingram said.) BHA will not be alerting those who have misfiled their applications.

“The first day [applications were available] we went through 2,000 applications,” Ingram reported, describing a line of people that circled the block at the housing authority. The central library ran out of forms and they were resupplied, she said.

Most city offices are closed today. However, applications will be available today at the housing authority office at 1901 Fairview St., and at the Center for Independent Living, 2539 Telegraph Ave., the East Bay Community Law Center, 2921 Adeline St., Centro Legal de la Raza, 2501 International Blvd. and the Asian Resource Center, 310 Eighth St.

There are two available homes, rather than the three originally available, because one family is transferring from one of the 14 state-owned low-income homes, according to Ingram. That home will become available under a different process.

In other BHA business, Ingram informed the board Wednesday evening that it cannot contract out for janitorial services, as it had planned to do. The city has an agreement that its unionized workers must do the job.

“I believe it’s significantly less cost” to contract outside the city, Ingram said, noting that BHA would be permitted to contract out after June 2008. Board member Marjorie Cox suggested BHA ask the city to donate custodial services, which amount to about $42,000 annually.

Ingram announced that a team from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Inspector General’s Office would be at the Berkeley BHA offices next week to do an investigation relative to charges made by City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque in May 22 and June 6 memos alleging improper allocation of Section 8 vouchers by housing staff and other charges of staff improprieties.

The board approved Ingram’s appointment of tenants to the Public Housing Resident Advisory Council, a body that must be in place to approve BHA’s Annual Plan, which is in the works. Approval of the plan by a tenant committee is required by HUD.

I’m not one for making holiday plans too early. I cringe at Halloween displays in stores on Labor Day, and abhor hearing ho-ho-ho’s anytime before Thanksgiving.

But there are a few winter holiday activities that do need to be thought about in early fall, since they can sell out well before the holidays actually arrive.

Here are three suggestions for diverse East Bay entertainments that might be of interest this December, but need to be scheduled soon: a ride on a vintage train, glowing with holiday lights; a musical dinner at UC Berkeley’s Faculty Club; and the Oakland version of the Christmas Revels.

First, the train. Down in southern Alameda County the historic Niles Canyon Railroad runs through the ravine of the same name. At Christmas the vintage railway cars and engines are draped and festooned, inside and out, with elaborate arrangements of colored lights and festive garlands to form the “Train of Lights.”

Evening excursionists ride the sparkling train through the Canyon from Sunol to Niles and back, about a 70-minute round trip. On most of the after-dark rides Santa comes along, and hot beverages, juice, and snacks are available for purchase.

Last year the holiday rides cost $20 for reserved seating in the enclosed cars, or $15 for outside seats. This year’s fares have not yet been posted.

The railroad volunteers are enthusiastic and cheery, and have accomplished a prodigious amount of work. They keep an entire railroad and its rolling stock in good condition with only volunteer labor, donations, and the proceeds from fundraisers such as the Train of Lights.

I’ve only been on the daytime train ride. It was well populated with families with young children, and my guess is that the holiday trains have a similar demographic.

You board and disembark from the train in Sunol, about an hour’s drive from Berkeley. There’s trackside parking at the station, which includes a small train-themed gift shop in the historic wooden depot.

This is a fun ride, but it’s not a luxury excursion. The trains jounce and rumble a bit along the tracks. The vintage passenger cars have simple padded seats, while the outdoor riding is on benches built on converted flatcars, roofed over, but with open sides. It can probably get chilly.

The Train of Lights runs on 19 dates this year, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, from Nov. 23 to Dec. 23. Each day there’s a 4:30 and a 7 p.m. train. Tickets apparently sell out very quickly.

The website currently says “Tickets go on sale in October” so keep checking there for a more specific date.

The route runs through a deep cleft, the outlet to the Bay for Alameda Creek, the East Bay’s biggest natural fresh watercourse.

Railroad tracks from San Jose were first laid into this steep-sided ravine by 1866, and in 1869 Niles Canyon became the route by which the Transcontinental Railroad threaded through the last barrier of hills and came down to the Pacific tidewater.

You won’t see much of the winter canyon landscape of steep, green, hillsides and riparian woodland on the night time trips, but if you enjoy the Train of Lights, you can always come back on a spring or summer weekend for a daytime ride.

Next, the campus party.

One of the oldest organized holiday events in Berkeley is the Faculty Club Christmas Party on the UC campus. It’s been more than a century since Cal professors first started festively decking their rustic hall designed by Bernard Maybeck.

This is a popular event, selling out three evenings a year. It’s a private party, members and guests only, but if you know a member of the Faculty Club, you can ask them to invite you. Members aren’t only professors; many are non-academic staff, or alumni.

The evening starts with light food and drinks in the lounges, and proceeds to a lavish meal served by waiters in the redwood-timbered Great Hall. Adjacent rooms with views into the Hall are opened up for additional diners. A tiny stage and risers, next to a small and capable band, accommodate volunteer entertainers.

First come the Monks, a venerable group of male club members and friends led for decades by “Prior” Milton Williams. They gather to sing an array of traditional numbers, including a “Boar’s Head’ carol partially in Latin, sung as a mock boar’s head is borne through the banqueting hall.

The Monks also finish off the evening with a rafter raising Hallelujah Chorus, and members of the audience are invited to come up and join in; many do, to the musical enrichment of the evening. There’s also a bit of Cal singing, including “Hail to California” and the subtly sarcastic “Faculty Hymn”.

The centerpiece of the evening is a light skit, written and performed by club members. Snippets of song, often from popular musicals, acquire new lyrics to parody the past year on campus. A wall-mounted moose head may come to life and join in the dialogue.

Foibles of faculty, Regents, administrators as well as sundry politicians are all fair game. The generally good-natured but also wickedly witty jibes also lament such evergreen academic preoccupations as low salaries, campus bureaucracy, and rifts between those in the humanities and hard sciences. Some true eminences, including one retired chancellor, have taken parts as volunteer performers.

Invitations are mailed to members in October and tickets are sought after and snapped up quickly. For this event the club only accepts reservations in writing; there are no on-line or telephone sign-ups.

Again, there’s no general public admission to this event; you have to be the guest of a club member. But ask around, you may well know one. Also keep in mind that this is a Christmas party with plenty of singing of traditional carols with religious content, although attendees of all faiths or none are welcome.

Each year I’ve attended I’ve met people, from on-campus and off, who are there for the first time and are delighted to take part. Many others have been coming for decades.

Third, the Christmas Revels.

Scattered around the country are various Revels programs, part of an organization founded in 1971. Oakland fortunately has a vigorous December performance series, produced by California Revels.

What’s a Christmas Revel? The program describes it as “a joyous production welcoming the return of the light back from the darkness of winter.” Oakland’s event takes place in the ornate Scottish Rite Theater, atop the Scottish Rite (Masonic) Temple on Lake Merritt.

Each year the Christmas Revels highlight a different holiday cultural tradition. Mid-winter and solstice holiday songs, dances, stories and rituals from that culture are assembled and performed by an appropriately costumed cast mixing professional entertainers with talented local amateurs, recruited in annual auditions.

Last year the setting was rustic, rural, French-Canada. Other Revels have traveled in theme to Ireland during the great immigration to America, Appalachia, the Italian Renaissance, Russia, Celtic Scotland, the Elizabethan and Middle Ages, and even Meso-America.

This year the program theme “follows a 19th century ‘Songcatcher’ as he wanders the English countryside, seeking to collect the songs, dances and village traditions that mark the turning of the year.”

Included are “mumming and Morris dancing, Christmas carols and some of their pub room predecessors, as well as English Country Dancing, children’s street games, storytelling and more” including a haunting Stag Horn Dance that’s a Christmas Revels tradition.

There are dozens of short songs and performances in each program ranging from sweet solos to energetic mass dances and choruses. At intermission, the cast takes a break while the audience is invited to join in dancing and song through the theater aisles (you can also just watch, not participate).

The setting itself is a treat, a glorious though worn, oval and oracular, auditorium with high tiers of seating that looks part opera house and part Harry Potter set.

I’ve only been once, but friends and family members are regulars and swear by it. I’m not sure that all the performances sell out, but certainly many of the better seats get taken early, so you should look into getting tickets when they go on sale to the general public Oct. 15.

TRAIN OF LIGHTS

For details and ticket information, go to www.ncry.org/home.htm and click on the Santa figure and Train of Lights icon on the right. Tickets go on sale on-line in October.

If you haven’t been on the Niles Canyon Railroad before, sure to read the “Frequently Asked Questions” at the bottom of the Train of Lights page.

The journey starts and ends in Sunol, about an hour’s drive from Berkeley.

FACULTY CLUB

The only way to attend is as a member or a guest of a member. Ask around amongst your friends. Tickets last year were $60 per person. The Club newsletter notes that invitations will be “mailed mid-October.” The party is repeated on three consecutive evenings, Wednesday through Friday, Dec. 5, 6, 7.

CHRISTMAS REVELS

The Christmas Revels stages ten performances, Dec. 7-9, and Dec. 14-16. There are six evening, and four early afternoon shows. All performances are in the Scottish Rite Theater next to Lake Merritt in Oakland. Tickets for the general public go on sale Oct. 15. For further information, see www.calrevels.org.

Photograph by Steven Finacom.

The Monks perform beneath a benevolent and animate moose head in the redwood Great Hall during last year’s Faculty Club Christmas Party.

Today it sounds like something from ancient history: a physically disabled person earning a university degree is relegated to living in a hospital.

But that’s what happened in 1962 to Ed Roberts, who was severely disabled from polio with virtually no functional movement and dependent on a respirator to breathe.

Known as the father of the disability rights movement, Roberts, one of the founders of Berkeley’s Center for Independent Living (CIL), “was the first severely disabled person admitted to the university,” Gerald Baptiste, CIL deputy director told the Daily Planet in an interview in the center’s offices on Telegraph Avenue on the occasion of the center’s 35th anniversary.

On Oct. 11, CIL will celebrate with an event at the downtown Oakland Rotunda Building, 300 Frank Ogawa Plaza, which includes a silent auction, dinner, dancing and entertainment. Tickets are $150 and available by calling 841-4776. Judy Heumann, a CIL co-founder and now director for the Department of Disability Services for the District of Columbia, will be honorary chair.

Roberts, who would become the first disabled head of the California Department of Rehabilitation, was housed in a wing at Cowell Hospital because there was no accessible dormitory, Baptiste said.

As the university accepted other severely disabled students, it housed them together at the hospital. While the students found this arrangement restricting, grouping the disabled together created the critical mass they needed to brainstorm about the conditions they would need in order to take control of their own lives and to help other disabled people to do the same.

The Physically Disabled Students’ Program came out of these discussions.

As they graduated, the former students faced new challenges. “As people came through the university and came out, they found they did not have the supportive services they needed to work in the community, live in the community and stay out of institutions,” Baptiste said.

And so the first Center for Independent Living was born in 1972, headquartered in a two-bedroom apartment near campus. In 1975, CIL moved into its current 2539 Telegraph Ave. headquarters.

Created by and for disabled people, the new agency was unique: “Being people with disabilities, they knew the type of services needed to make [the agency] happen,” Baptiste said.

CIL was founded to resolve the everyday problems facing the disabled community: finding accessible, affordable housing, vocational training and attendant services were among them. The agency also took on the task of educating the community about disabilities.

And CIL founders had a vision for systemic change, working on policy issues to guarantee the rights of disabled people.

Baptiste said there was a reason that the independent living movement began in the Bay Area, which was the home of the free speech and anti-war movements and the Black Panther Party.

Bay Area people “immediately supported the idea of independence for people with disabilities,” he said.

Baptiste, who lost most of his vision at age 29, went to work at CIL in 1979. Hired by Michael Winter, now director for the Office of Civil Rights in the Federal Transit Administration, Baptiste had planned to work in CIL’s blind services for a short time, then move on. He’s been there 27 years and deputy director since 1985.

When Baptiste came to CIL, it was fiscally stronger than it has ever been, with a budget of $3.2 million per year and a staff of 200. But funding was severely cut back in the early 1980s, and the agency radically downscaled to 28 employees. The agency was able to adapt to the changing times and helped birth independent sister agencies such as BORP, Bay Area Outreach and Recreation Programs, and DREDF, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.

While those who founded CIL worked tirelessly behind the scenes in education and policy, they also made themselves highly visible in struggles for the civil rights of disabled people.

One was the fight for “504,” Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act that protected people from discrimination in federally funded organizations and programs.

Passage of the legislation was not enough—it had to be implemented.

That took the militancy of Judy Heumann, Ed Roberts and hundreds of other disabled activists and their supporters who sat in, in federal buildings across the country. “On April 5, 1977, everybody agreed to move into the federal buildings and not come out until the implementation of 504,” Baptiste said.

In the San Francisco offices of the Federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare, some 150 people camped out for 26 days as hundreds of others marched outside United Nations Plaza.

The action resulted in the signing of regulations implementing Section 504, the precursor to the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

Among the more visible local impacts of 504 was Berkeley’s curb cut program, the first of such programs in the nation.

Today the face of CIL has changed. It has a modest 54 employees, housed in four different offices: downtown Oakland, Fruitvale and East Oakland, in addition to the one on Telegraph.

“We do that to make sure that we not only have outreach in those communities, but a presence in those communities,” says Baptiste. An African American, Baptiste said one of CIL’s founding strengths that continues today is its outreach to minority and underserved communities.

“CIL, as an independent living center, leads all independent living centers in California in our outreach as well as diversity in our staff,” Baptiste said.

There is a stark divide between the more wealthy white and low-income minority communities in their knowledge of available services and how to access them, Baptiste said.

Those who are aware of how to access services are more able to move on with their lives and adjust to the disability, Baptiste said.

For a person unaware that there is help, especially one who becomes disabled late in life, “the only thing that they know or feel is that it is almost the end of life for them … They’ve lost their self-confidence and their self-esteem. They’re just existing,” Baptiste said.

Different times bring different needs. Today Baptiste is working on programs for the young “macho” people who have been shot and are disabled. “They need to get started in the right direction,” Baptiste said, noting that many come from families that have little knowledge of disability and advocacy.

Employer education and vocational education are key, Baptiste said, pointing to statistics that show that only a small percentage of the disabled population is employed.

Given training and opportunities, people can “succeed or fail according to their own abilities,” Baptiste said. “I think everyone deserves that right regardless of their economic standard or their race. And I feel like we have an obligation to reach out and make sure that happens.”

The healthcare divide between the wealthy and the poor has ramifications in the disabled community, Baptiste said, noting poverty can lead to poor healthcare, which can result in disability.

In some instances, what could become a severe disability may be prevented or mitigated if caught early, he said, pointing to the example of the Buffalo Bills’ tight end Kevin Everett, who received severe spinal injuries in a Sept. 9 game and got immediate extraordinary medical care that may allow him to walk again.

Still going strong, CIL has an annual budget of $2.1 million and provides some 68,000 informational referrals annually. Yet, “It’s still grassroots,” Baptiste said.

“We often have more consumers than staff hours to work with them,” Baptiste said, noting that the staff has a passion for what they do and work at low pay and long hours.

There are plans for big changes in the future: moving the CIL headquarters from Telegraph to a new office complex, to be called the Ed Roberts Campus, on the eastern parking lot of the Ashby BART station.

CIL Director Jan Garrett told the Daily Planet that it looks like funding for the project is complete. The campus will house a host of services for disabled people in one place including a center for technology, legal services and more.

“Many people can benefit from the wide variety of services that will be there—a one-stop center for services,” said Garrett, a quadriplegic who practiced law before taking over the direction of CIL eight years ago.

The Ed Roberts Campus is to be truly accessible, a standard now known as “universal,” with large elevators, wide doorways, completely accessible restrooms and audible directions for people with visual impairments, Garrett said.

What motivates Baptiste, now 73, has not changed over the years. “My enjoyment comes from doing the outreach and finding and assisting people,” he said, and supporting them as they stand up and say, “I do have a right.”

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board member Chris Kavanagh, charged with five felony counts related to voter fraud, perjury and collecting city funds under false pretenses, will plead not guilty and he will not step down from his office, Kavanagh’s attorney James Giller told the Daily Planet Monday.

Kavanagh was arrested Friday near the 63rd Street cottage in Oakland, where he is alleged to live and has been free on $30,000 bail since Saturday night, according to his attorney, James Giller.

He will be arraigned Thursday at 2 p.m. at the Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse, Dept. 112.

Questions about whether Kavanagh, 49, an elected official, lives in Oakland or Berkeley surfaced earlier this year when new landlords Lynn and Pat Tidd attempted to evict Kavanagh from the 63rd Street cottage in Oakland, where his name is on the lease.

Kavanagh has told fellow rent board members that he lives in Berkeley but has a girlfriend in Oakland.

Similar questions concerning Kavanagh’s residence had been sent to the Alameda County district attorney’s office by the Berkeley city attorney in 2003, but the district attorney had declined to charge him at the time. Chief Assistant D.A. Nancy O’Malley told the Daily Planet on Monday that new evidence in the case had led to her office’s filing charges at this time.

Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff, who spoke to the Planet Friday afternoon, said Kavanagh is charged with five felonies: registering to vote where he is not eligible; voting where he is not eligible to vote; filing false nominating papers; and perjury and grand theft, relating to having accepted a stipend and health benefits as a rent board member.

Giller said Kavanagh plans to plead not guilty. “I haven’t seen the evidence,” he said.

A $100,000 bail was originally set improperly before the D.A. formally filed the complaint, Giller said, noting that Kavanagh was originally booked on more charges than were actually filed.

Kavanagh was freed Saturday night on $30,000 bail, according to his attorney James Giller. He would have been out earlier had there not been a paperwork snafu. “They either lost [the paper work] or took a long time to find it,” Giller said.

“[Thirty thousand dollars] is the regular bail for the charges filed,” Giller said, further noting that his client was, in error, directed to report to the Renee Davidson Courthouse for arraignment Monday morning, which he did.

Once there, he was told he needed to go to the Wiley Manual Courthouse on Thursday, which he plans to do, according to Giller.

Rent Board Chair Jesse Arreguin said he has been in discussions with Rent Board Executive Director Jay Kelekian on what steps the rent board should take in the matter.

“We’ve talked about putting his stipend [$500 per month] into an escrow account until the case is resolved,” Arreguin said. He added that as chair he has the power to remove Kavanagh from the board committees on which he sits.

“I haven’t seen the evidence,” Arreguin said.

The board does not have the power to remove Kavanagh, Arreguin added.

The landlord at the 63rd Street cottage, Lynn Tidd, alerted the press by e-mail to Kavanagh’s arrest on Friday, saying: “We had the pleasure of watching Chris Kavanagh arrested this morning shortly after leaving his home of six years, 338 63rd St. His home will be searched within the hour.”

In a phone interview Friday afternoon, Tidd told the Planet that she had helped alert police to when Kavanagh was at the house since, she said, he had been observed there infrequently over the last couple of weeks.

At about 6 a.m. Friday, Kavanagh “was walking up 63rd Street getting coffee. Police walked up to him and put him in a police car,” said Tidd, who lives in a unit in front of the house and observed the arrest.

Friends and family of Gary W. King rallied outside of Oakland City Hall Monday afternoon to call for the prosecution of the police sergeant who shot and killed the 20-year-old Oakland resident last Thursday.

“It was all wrong. It was not legal. It was an execution. It was murder,” said Berkeley resident Xavier Alladin Shanklin, 18, a witness to the fatal shooting and a longtime friend of King. “We are all traumatized, we are all hurting.”

Protesters say Sgt. Pat Gonzales should have used other means to subdue King, who died at Highland Hospital after he was shot twice in the back.

“It’s an injustice. He could have shot him in his leg,” said Berkeley resident Neenee Franklin, 16, who first met King three years ago when she lived on 54th Street and Martin Luther King Way. “He was always there with a warm heart, and he always wanted to know I was okay … He always came with a smile.”

Gonzales approached King at around 4:30 p.m. as he was coming out of a convenience store, believing the young man to fit the description of a suspect wanted in the murder of a Pittsburg man in August. Police say King resisted Gonzales’ attempt to question him, and a struggle ensued between them. After an attempt at subduing King with a taser gun failed, Gonzales says he shot King twice in the back as he was running away from him, claiming King appeared to be reaching into his pants for a gun. Police spokesperson Michael Poirier said a loaded revolver was found on Gonzales.

Witnesses dispute police claims. “I didn’t see a gun. None of us saw a gun,” said Shanklin, one of four witnesses we spoke to who say they were about 20 yards away from the scene. “The police are the ones who put the dope on us. They’re the ones who put the guns on us.”

Shanklin is not alone is his distrust of the police. Mon’a Lewis, a 15-year-old Oakland resident who knew King for three years, said King was a “nice guy” who would never be involved in a murder.

“I think it’s racism,” she said. “They stereotype any black male. Basically, if you’re wearing a white shirt and jeans and a beanie, you are considered a criminal.”

Gonzales is a member of the department’s crime reduction unit and had been instructed to question people who match the description of the suspect of an Aug. 21 murder. In that case, Pittsburg resident Ronald Spears, 29, was shot and killed by a man he agreed to give a ride to in exchange for directions. Once inside the car, the suspect demanded money from the victim, and a struggle ensued that caused the car to crash on 55th Street. Spears was then shot and killed by the suspect.

Protesters at the rally demanded to speak with Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and called on the city to fire Gonzales, a nine-year veteran who has been involved in another fatal shooting.

“We need to make sure that … Gonzales is not receiving a paycheck from the OPD,” said Keith Shanklin, the spokesperson for the family. Shanklin, who has spoken to witnesses, said Gonzales never identified himself to King or explained why he was detaining him. “He was just provoking him,” he said.

Dellums’ spokesperson, Paul Rose, said the mayor’s office can’t comment on the case until the police department completes its internal investigation.

Shanklin said the family is considering legal action and is in the process of selecting an attorney to take on their case.

Rashidah Grinage, director of People United for a Better Oakland, said she plans to file a complaint with the Oakland Citizen Police Review Board. “This case is extremely troubling,” she said. “It is very important that there be an outside investigation by citizens, independent of the police department.”

After her mother’s death in 1999, journalist Emily Yellin came across the wartime diary and hundreds of letters her mother had written home from the Pacific while working with the Red Cross. Within days, Yellin could see that “My mother’s story served as a window through which to see the story of all the women in World War II.”

Yellin, who wrote for the New York Times for 10 years, tells that broader story in her book Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II. She will speak at a gala event on Friday, Sept. 28, at Richmond’s Marina Bay to kick off the Home Front Festival by the Bay. The festival celebrates both the city’s role during World War II and the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park.

Reached by phone at her home in Memphis, Yellin spoke about the women who moved into the workforce to take the place of the 16 million men—farm laborers, mailmen, milkmen, movie ushers, salesmen, and many more—who volunteered or were drafted into the service after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.

To counteract the sudden shortage of manpower, the federal government went into action to convince reluctant Americans that the nation needed women of all classes to enter the workforce.

According to Yellin, “We went from the Depression to World War II, and during the Depression, women did not work. The women who did work were usually in the financially lower rungs of the working world.

“For those women, World War II raised up the opportunity, so someone who had been working as a housecleaner was able to work in a factory and make a lot more money. In fact, there’s a quote in the book by an African American woman who said, ‘It was Hitler who got us out of the white man’s kitchen.’”

Before 1940, 11.5 million women already worked for pay. And 6.5 million women joined them in the war years. More than 2.5 million women took war production jobs, working with ships, airplanes, tanks, Jeeps, or munitions.

Yellin interviewed Bessie Stokes of Pennsylvania, a white woman who had gone from earning $2 a week cleaning houses before the war to well over $30 a week inspecting bombshells in a factory beginning in 1941. She worked there until 1946, when her husband, Spike, returned from the service.

“I kept every one of my pay stubs from all my work. So when Spike came back from the war, the first day he was home, I put them in front of him. And I said, ‘Don’t you ever tell me I have to depend on you for a living.’” Spike’s response was to look at his wife proudly and say, “Oh girl, you proved it.”

“I think it was a revolution for women’s role in our society,” said Yellin, “but it was inadvertent. It wasn’t like 20 to 30 years later, with the women’s liberation movement; that was very deliberate. This was very much an inadvertent revolution, so these women stepped in and did what was asked of them and what they were allowed to do.”

The revolution took place all over the United States, according to Yellin, as women moved into work previously reserved for men. But most in society assumed that this was only a temporary arrangement.

“Every region of the country was affected by the war,” said Yellin. Shipbuilding took place along the east and west coasts and the Gulf of Mexico. Auto plants in the Midwest and elsewhere stopped building cars in 1942, converting their shops to build engines and parts for military vehicles. Richmond’s Ford assembly plant outfitted Jeep and tank bodies. The South and the east were home to munitions plants. And the west coast was the home of airplane manufacturing.

Even before the U.S. entered the war, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser landed a government contract to build ships for Great Britain. Despite having no experience in shipbuilding, he opened his Richmond business in late 1940.

Richmond’s population boomed from about 23,000 at the start of the war to over 100,000 people by the war’s end.

According to Donna Graves of the National Park Service, author of a 2004 report titled “Mapping Richmond’s World War II Home Front,” “Recruitment of workers for the four Kaiser shipyards … changed the city’s ethnic composition, increasing the African American community by a factor of ten,” and bringing in more Latinos and Chinese Americans.

The shipyards ran day and night. Kaiser shipbuilders crafted Liberty and Victory ships, once completing a Liberty ship in just under 5 days. The Red Oak Victory ship, now under restoration, will be open for viewing during the Home Front Festival.

According to Donald Bastin, director of the Richmond Museum of History and author of the book Richmond, “Kaiser wanted to eliminate all barriers to production” for his 90,000 workers, 27 percent of whom were women, “and that included transport, health care, and child care.”

Housing was scarce, and services could not keep up with the influx of workers arriving from all over the United States, some without a network of family who could care for their children.

Federal funds from the 1942 Lanham Act made possible the opening of five child care centers in Richmond in 1943.

Said Yellin, “Day care was a new concept essentially because people weren’t used to leaving their children with someone else. That was women’s responsibility, the children, the home, and women didn’t go outside of the home.”

By the end of the war, Richmond had 14 child care centers and had taken care of about 1,400 children, said Joseph Fischer, curator of an exhibit of art by children at the centers that is now showing at the Richmond Museum of History. A selection will be on display at the Home Front Festival.

Kaiser’s other innovation, and the reason most people now know his name, was providing group health care for his workers. The Richmond Field Hospital treated sick and injured workers near the job site, and the Permanente Hospital in Oakland provided additional service.

Yellin added, “I think we forget how [war] permeated every aspect of people’s lives. So when we say ‘the home front,’ it sounds like a cozy place, but it really wasn’t, just as the battle front was not a cozy place.” Everyone lived with the thought that beloved family members on the front might be wounded or die at any time.

“The effect of this war was so prevalent that wherever you looked, you couldn’t really get away from it, that is what living on the home front was.”

The Home Front Festival will host the “Think Big” exhibit, with information about Kaiser’s life and work. Additional events include a Rosie Reunion for former shipyard workers, a USO dance and show, music performances, arts and crafts, historic tours of the bay, and visits of the tall ship Alma and FDR’s yacht the Potomac.

For tickets, call 235-1315. Emily Yellin will also sign copies of her book on Sunday at the Ford building beginning at 11:30 a.m.

Home Front Festival By the Bay

The festival kicks off on Friday, Sept. 28 with a 9 a.m.-2 p.m. rally at the park headquarters at the Ford Building Craneway on the Richmond Waterfront, followed by a Rosie the Riveter Trust Fund dinner from 6 to 10 p.m.

Saturday will see activities at four separate locations, representing the spread-out nature of the Rosie the Riveter Park.

Music and other entertainment, food and arts and crafts booths, and a children’s zone will be presented from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Rosie the Riveter Memorial at Marina Bay. Entrance fee to the Marina Bay event is $5 for adults, $3 for seniors and children 6-12.

At Shipyard No. 3, a pancake breakfast will be held at the Red Oak Victory World War II era restored cargo ship, with ceremonies at 11 a.m. launching the national park featuring nationally known performance artist Linda Tillery. A Vintage Military Vehicle Show will be held at the shipyard from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and interpretive tours from noon to 3 p.m.

At the Harbor Master's Dock, historic tours of the bay will be held on the historic schooner “Alma” from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

And at the Ford Building Craneway, a USO Dance and Show will be held from 7-10 p.m.

On Sunday the festival events at the Rosie the Riveter Memorial at Marina Bay will be repeated. At the Ford Building Craneway, a presentation on the story of Henry K. Kaiser and reunions for former World War II home front workers will be held from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. At the Harbor Master’s Dock, historic bay tours will be held 11 a.m.-3 p.m. on the trawler Delphinus, as well as tours of the moored presidential yacht Potomac that was once used by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

A full schedule of homefront festival events are available on the Rosie the Riveter Park website at http://www.homefrontfestival.com/what.htm.

Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park:

www.nps.gov/rori

To submit a story for the oral history project, call (800) 497-6743.

Emily Yellin’s book, Our Mothers’ War:

www.ourmotherswar.com

Donna Graves, “Mapping Richmond’s World War II Home Front,” NPS, July 2004:

Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive Director Kevin Consey will leave his post in January, the museum announced Friday.

That means he won’t be in charge when the project he was hired to build—the new museum building on Center Street—is finally opened to the public.

The sometimes controversial administrator took the helm at the university museum and film center on Jan. 1, 2000. His official date for leaving the post will be Jan. 2.

In a prepared statement released by the museum, Consey said, “I have been privileged to work with a talented and energetic staff of the highest professional caliber during my tenure. The significant and substantial accomplishments produced during this time were due to our collaborative efforts and their intelligence, skill, and perseverance.

“The continuing demanding work and challenges of the new building project and capital campaign need increased energy over the next several years. Eight years of service and significant accomplishments in the areas of institutional growth and preparatory fundraising, program development, architect selection, and conceptual design work for a new building mark a good time to step down and retire."

Peter Selz, the museum’s founding director, welcomed the news.

“He was not very competent and somewhat arrogant,” said Selz, who also acknowledged that Consey was effective at raising funds, “which is also important.”

“I look forward to the chance of getting someone very talented to replace him,” he said.

Selz particularly faulted Consey for his refusal to allow the museum to show the Colombian artist Fernando Botero’s paintings of the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison—works Selz said were the most important creations of the last few years.

“The Center for Latin American Studies had to show them in a special room at the library,” he said. “It was a very important show, and 15,000 people came.”

Consey’s resignation comes less than a month after the UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau told the San Francisco Chronicle that Botero wanted to give the university all 25 paintings and 22 drawings in the series, with the proviso that some be permanently displayed.

Whether or not the chancellor’s decision to accept the gift had any bearing on Consey’s decision to leave remained unclear as the Daily Planet went to press Monday evening.

In addition to his campus duties, Consey also serves as one of the university’s ex officio representatives to the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee.

The new museum planned for the northwest corner of the intersection of Center and Oxford streets will be one of the centerpieces of the proposed pedestrian plaza that would provide an architectural link between town and the university and is one of the key elements of the new plan now being completed by the committee.

The plan results from the settlement of a city lawsuit challenging the university’s extensive plans for expansion into downtown Berkeley, and the university has final say over the document.

Before joining the Berkeley museum, Consey had served as director of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, where he presided over a similar building campaign.

He had also served as director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum in the 1980s.

Consey presided over an interim seismic upgrading of the museum’s aging Bancroft Way building, and has headed the efforts to raise funds for the new structure, now being designed by Japanese architect Toyo Ito.

During Consey’s tenure, the museum reported in a press release, the endowment for the institution nearly quadrupled, rising from $15.5 million to $60.8 million.

Berkeley police are investigating two deaths on Saturday as the city’s third and fourth homicide of 2007.

In one case, Berkeley police are looking for a vehicle that may be involved in a shooting that took place at the intersection of 63rd and King streets.

At approximately 3:30 p.m. Saturday multiple reports were called in of shots fired. When police arrived on the scene, they found that a man had been shot multiple times in the upper torso, said Lt. Wesley Hester.

The man, whose age and identity are being withheld, was brought to Highland Hospital where he was pronounced dead, according to Hester.

The shooter fled the scene but people nearby reported that at one point he occupied an older, faded, dark blue minivan, said Hester, possibly a 1980s vintage. Berkeley police have given information about the shooter and the vehicle to police from Oakland and Emeryville, and to California Highway Patrol.

Hester said that at least one person is suspected of being involved in the shooting. In the case of the other homocide reported that day, a resident of a home in the 1800 block of Eighth Street called police at 4:36 a.m. Saturday, notifying 911 operators of a male acquaintance who the caller said fell and hit his head, according to Berkeley police Sgt. Mary Kusmiss.

When officers arrived, they found a man believed to be in his 30s “lifeless” outside on a walkway, Kusmiss said. Berkeley Fire Department paramedics pronounced the man dead at about 4:42 a.m.

According to Kusmiss, officers are “not sure if a fall was part of the equation,” and “due to the nature of the victim’s apparent injuries, lack of clear or sufficient facts as to what happened and the obvious gravity of the incident, detectives of the Berkeley Police Department’s homicide detail have taken over the investigation and are pursuing the case as a homicide.’’

Police are withholding the victim’s name and the specific nature of his injuries out of concern that the release of the information might impact the investigation.

Planning commissioners meet Wednesday to hold their second and final vote on the zoning ordinance and plan amendments paving the way for car dealers to set up shop in West Berkeley.

During their meeting on Sept. 5, members voted for only one of the two areas proposed for new dealerships in areas previously zoned for manufacturing and light industrial uses.

After critics challenged the original proposal—which would have created two separate areas for new car dealers, one near the Gilman Street freeway interchange and the second south of Ashby Avenue near the freeway—commissioners opted to withdraw the Ashby portion.

Mayor Tom Bates and the city’s economic development staff pushed the plan and zoning changes because they said they are needed to keep car retailers and their sales tax dollars in the city.

According to comments by dealers during earlier commission meetings, manufacturers want their dealers concentrated in “freeway-close” clusters.

The problem with the Ashby parcel was that it consisted largely of the sites of two venerable Berkeley businesses whose owners said they have no desire to leave—Ashby Lumber and Urban Ore.

The larger parcel, paralleling the freeway on either side of Gilman, also includes one property commissioners have considered exempting—the city’s Transfer Station on Second Street and Gilman, an integral feature of the city’s Zero Waste recycling effort.

Commissioners are also scheduled to appoint liaisons to the West Berkeley Project Area Committee and its transportation subcommittee for their reviews of the West Berkeley Circulation Master Pan.

Also scheduled for discussion Wednesday are updates on the environmental reviews of projects at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and on its Long Range Development Plan.

Commissioners will also discuss comments by the city’s transportation staff on the draft environmental review of AC Transit’s proposed Bus Rapid Transit program.

While the City Council has yet to endorse the project—one that could carve out dedicated lanes on Telegraph and Shattuck avenues—the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC) has given its blessings to the proposal.

Three planning commissioners sit on DAPAC: Chair James Samuels and members Helen Burke and Gene Poschman.

The legal focus shifted Thursday and Friday to what the plaintiffs charge is a host of violations of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which requires approval of a thorough environmental impact report (EIR), complete with mitigations, before construction of major projects can move forward.

Currently at issue in Panoramic Hill Association et al. vs. The Regents of the University of California is whether the regents legally approved both the EIR and the budget for the first of the projects in the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects (SCIP).

That structure, officially named the Barclay Simpson Student Athlete High Performance Center, would be built along the stadium’s western wall at the site where protesters are perched in the branches of trees to be felled to make way for the high tech gym and athletic department offices.

Bomb worries

Court got off to a late start Friday, thanks to police response to a threatening note found stuck with chewing gum to the courthouse door.

Judge Miller said the threat to an unnamed judge and the district attorney “mentioned the word kill,” which led police to gather up all the judges and keep them at the Hayward Police Department while the drama played out.

“My colleagues all tried to blame it on me,” Miller said. But the judge pointed out to her peers that the county prosecutor wasn’t involved in the highest profile case on her agenda.

While the judges were safely secluded and employees of the courthouse and adjacent county buildings were evacuated to nearby sidewalks, officers and a bomb-sniffing dog searched the building and its environs.

After the pooch focused on a trash can, members of the Sheriff’s Department bomb squad blew up the receptacle on the concrete plaza outside the courthouse, discovering nothing sinister amongst the smoldering rubbish.

Court finally commenced at 11:13 a.m.

Questioned authority

Thursday’s hearing pitted Stephan Volker, attorney for the California Oaks Foundation, Berkeley Councilmember Dona Spring and an assortment of other plaintiffs against Charles Olson, the San Francisco real estate attorney who is representing the regents.

The main focus of debate was whether the regents followed the dictates of CEQA in the way they did—or didn’t—approve the gym budget and the EIR that examines the gym, a new office building, an underground parking lot, stadium renovations and the other SCIP projects.

“The university failed to follow the procedure required by law” when they delegated authority to their own Committee on Grounds and Buildings to approve the EIR last Dec. 5, rather than the full board, said Volker.

Because the committee contains less than a majority of the board’s members, the actions of the two bodies can’t be equated, Volker argued, while Olson said the board’s own rules contain a definition of “Board of Regents” that allows the committee to serve as the “lead agency” which CEQA requires to give approval to an EIR.

The full board had approved the gym’s budget three weeks early, a decision both sides agreed was necessary because of the board’s own rules dictating that projects costing more than $20 million be authorized by a majority of the full board.

Because the full board approved the budget, Volker said, the same body was obligated to vote on the EIR, making the committee vote a matter of improper delegation of authority.

Just when and to whom a public body can delegate authority for key decisions under CEQA has been litigated with regard to elected bodies, and one of the findings Judge Miller will have to decide is how the law and the cases apply to the non-elected Board of Regents.

Seismic issue

Volker also argued that the court should order the EIR recirculated for more public comments because the day before the committee voted approval, state and federal geologists had sent letters that said a more extensive search for an active fault was needed beneath the gym site.

Olson said the seismic research conducted for the EIR had been legally adequate, and that the opinions of the two agencies were just that—opinions—and shouldn’t outweigh positive reports by the university’s hired seismic consultants and a second opinion by another firm, as well as the school’s own seismic committee.

Volker noted that the school committee wasn’t even composed of geologists, and thus should be given no weight.

Left uncited by either side for legal reasons was a subsequent investigation by the lead consultants, which the two government agencies agreed had cleared the site.

The report couldn’t be considered legally because it was conducted after the EIR was approved and after the three lawsuits challenging the EIR approval had been filed.

The legal issue remains whether the committee acted on the basis of adequate information when they voted to approve despite the concerns of the official geologic agencies.

Omitted impacts

Friday’s hearing was the first to target what the plaintiffs call specific omissions in the EIR, with the court’s attention directed particularly to biological and archaeological impacts—especially those of the planned gym.

Drawing more attention to the highest-profile biological impact was a “Save the Oaks” banner which was briefly tied to a courthouse balcony railing the day before by Ayr, who has been coordinating logistical support for the tree-sitters occupying the crowns of threatened trees in the stadium grove.

Volker again took the lead, as the two other attorneys—Harriet Steiner for the city and Michael Lozeau for the Panoramic Hill Association—listened.

The key issue is whether the regents adopted an EIR that failed to address the impacts of the project on nature and history.

Instead of including detailed examinations of both issues—though the report did talk about the cultural impacts of axing the grove—the EIR sidestepped the issue by referring readers back to the 2004 EIR prepared for the university’s campus-wide Long Range Development Plan (LRDP).

Because of the work done for that document, which includes the area covered in the SCIP EIR, the university didn’t need to do anything more, Olson contended.

But Volker, joined by his colleagues, insisted that EIR failed the legal test because it didn’t make a specific assessment of biological and archaeological impacts of the stadium-side gym-and-office project.

The LRDP considered three major areas, devoting most of its environmental impact to the hill campus and the central core of the main campus, declaring that there was little in the way of biological impacts on the northern, western and southern margins of the campus—the latter including the stadium area.

Olson noted that the grove itself consists primarily of trees planted by the university after the stadium was built. Many are so-called specimen trees, noteworthy examples of their species, and he said the mitigations of replacing the lost trees with three-for-one new plantings is an adequate mitigation.

Grave dispute?

One issue that remains unclear to the plaintiffs is just how many Native American burials were found during construction of the stadium.

The only mention in the SCIP EIR is that the discovery of archaeological remains is likely, and will be mitigated by the availability of an archaeological expert during construction, when all work is to stop if anything is uncovered.

But just how many burials are present at the stadium is not clear.

After the LRDP draft EIR was submitted to the public, Berkeley amateur historian Richard Schwartz wrote to warn that 18 burials had been found during the course of stadium construction, while other remains were found during work on the university’s Faculty Club.

The university didn’t dispute the number then, noting in its response in the final EIR, “UC Berkeley has conducted a records search at the Information Center and is aware of the burials you mentioned.”

But Friday, Olson insisted that only one burial was discovered during stadium construction.

Neither the plaintiffs nor the press have any way of verifying the number since the data is filed with the Northwest Information Center for the California Historical Resources Information Center at Sonoma State University, where only landowners and builders are allowed to see site files.

Harriet Steiner has had little to say so far, but she is expected to take the lead when the discussion turns to allegations that the EIR gave short shrift to the impact of the SCIP projects on the city and its citizenry and infrastructure.

Court will resume for a one-day session today (Tuesday), with the next scheduled event a Sunday afternoon visit by Judge Miller to the SCIP projects site.

Up to three more days of hearing will be held next week, with the judge holding Tuesday through Thursday open for the case.

Representatives of the Wayans Brothers-Pacifica Capital Urban Development Partnership have said that they did not know, when they signed an exclusive negotiating agreement (ENA) with the City of Oakland to purchase old Oakland Army Base property, that the Port of Oakland was planning a bayfill and container cargo storage in waters directly across from that property.

If they didn’t, the Wayans-Pacifica Capital representatives must not have reviewed the numerous public reports that were readily available on websites operated by the port, the city, and the State of California referring to the bayfill proposal.

A Wayans Brothers-Pacifica Capital spokesperson called for renegotiations of the ENA in mid-summer, after they said that they and city officials first learned of the planned port bayfill, which the spokesperson described as including 42 acres.

But Karen Boyd, a spokesperson for Oakland City Administrator Deborah Edgerly, said earlier this month that both the administrator’s office and the Wayans-Pacifica Capital group knew about the proposed port bayfill before the negotiating agreement was signed, and that the bayfill itself had been long planned and discussed by city and port officials.

And a spokesperson for the Port of Oakland said the proposed fill, which she said was “approximately 25 acres” has been in the planning stages since the mid-1990s, and is mentioned in several port and city documents, including the document turning the old Army Base over to the City and Port of Oakland. “Basically, this is something that has been in the works for several years as part of the Berth 21 Project,” said Marilyn Sandifur, Media and Public Relations Specialist for the port.

The map submitted to the Oakland City Council last July setting the boundaries of the land to be purchased and developed under the Oakland/Wayans-Pacifica agreement showed the main portion of the Wayans development outlined in part by a dark border reading “Berth 21 Easement.”

Both the bayfill and Berth 21 are mentioned in State Senator Don Perata’s Oakland Army Base Public Trust Exchange Act of 2005, which authorized the taking over of the old Army Base lands by the Port of Oakland and the City of Oakland. That legislation describes the Port of Oakland’s Berth 21 Project which “will require the filling with solid earth of approximately 28 acres of land below the present line of mean high tide.”

And the 2006 agreement between the City of Oakland and the Port of Oakland that settled how the army base lands would be divided between the two entities also mentions a “strip of submerged land within the Gateway Development area that will be filled and cut off from the waterfront by the Berth 21 Project.”

But a representative of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which must approve any bayfill proposals, said the commission is “familiar with” the Port of Oakland’s Berth 21 Project’s bay fill aspects, “but we are not aware that any application has been filed with us yet.”

The commission spokesperson said that anything between the 28 and 42 acre fills being talked about would be considered “major” by the commission, requiring the production of an environmental document (such as an Environmental Impact Report) and a public hearing.

A spokesperson for the environmentalist Save the Bay organization, which has offices in Frank Ogawa Plaza next to Oakland City Hall, said this week that they contacted Port of Oakland officials following newspaper reports of the Wayans Brothers announcement about the proposed bayfill, but were told that the port “didn’t have any plans to fill in the bay.”

The person who actually talked with port officials, Save The Bay Executive Director David Lewis, was not available to speak with reporters, so it is possible that the port’s statement could have resulted from a misunderstanding. But Save the Bay Communications Manager Jessica Castelli said her organization “would definitely be concerned about any plans to fill in the bay. Ninety-five percent of the wetlands originally surrounding the bay have been destroyed by filling or diking. Our mission is to protect the remaining wetlands areas, as well as to expand the wetlands by restoring some of the areas that have been lost.”

The Wayans-Pacifica Capital group is trying to renegotiate the terms of an Exclusive Negotiating Agreement signed with the City of Oakland in early July for the proposed purchase of 47 acres of old army base property.

The Wayans Brothers—a family of highly-successful African-American film producers, actors and writers and nationally known stand-up comedians—are proposing putting a film production studio, a children’s digital arts learning center, retail development, and several other projects on the site.

But Britten Shuford, co-managing partner of the Wayans Brothers-Pacifica Capital Urban Development Partnership, told the Planet earlier this month that his group “learned at the same time that the city did that the Port of Oakland was proposing to fill in 42 acres of the bay directly across from our development, and they are planning to stack storage containers on that land six to 15 stories tall. That would entirely block our view of the San Francisco skyline.”

Shufford said that views of the skyline from the area of the army base were spectacular and had been one of the items that made the Oakland deal attractive to the Wayans Brothers.

Shufford said in light of what he characterized as the belated discovery, his group plans to meet with city officials this month to try to draw up an alternative agreement with a new configuration of where the group’s development would be located.

The WBCBD, a tax assessment district, is being proposed by members of the West Berkeley Business Alliance (WBBA), a group of mostly commercial property owners in the area. As proposed by the group, the district would include all property owners—residential and commercial—who would be assessed according to the size of the business. The purpose of the district is tentatively to do cleanup, security, graffiti removal and to impact city planning decisions.

The power to decide on whether to have such a district would depend on the size of the business, with the larger owners having a greater say.

The area in question is roughly between San Pablo Avenue and the Bay and Dwight Way South to the Oakland-Emeryville border.

Some 100 residents and small business owners who fear their concerns have been left out of the mix have held two meetings and plan to oppose efforts to establish the district.

After these meetings, to which the WBBA members were invited, WBBA decided to take the neighborhood comments into consideration, Caplan said. “[WBBA] will come back with alternate proposals. They were concerned that if the community meetings were held too early, it would just turn into a bitching session,” Caplan said.

Berkeley Developers Ruegg & Ellsworth will ask the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) Thursday for a use permit to redevelop the former Tower Records building at 2517 Durant Ave.

The developers want a blanket use permit to develop the two-story building, similar to the one granted developer John Gordon for the Wright’s Garage building located at 2629-2635 Ashby Ave.

Gordon requested a use permit to convert the existing three-tenant commercial building (the Wright’s Garage building) into a four-to-seven-tenant commercial building and to change the uses to one restaurant, one exercise/dance studio and up to five retail spaces.

ZAB approved the Gordon project in March without knowing the specific kinds of businesses that would be housed in it. Neighbors were concerned about noise, parking and traffic impacts.

The Tower Records building has been sitting empty for nearly three years.

The proposed plans include a karaoke bar on the ground floor and a carry-out food service and fitness club for the second floor. Applicants have also asked for extended hours for the combined services.

With the exception of the karaoke bar, the plan does not identify the size and nature of the other businesses or their possible impacts on the neighborhood.

Fidelity building remodeling

The mixed-use development of the historic Fidelity Bank building at 2323 Shattuck Ave. will be back before ZAB Thursday.

ZAB approved a project earlier this month which would preserve the existing 4,000-square-foot structure and convert the two-story bank space into a restaurant with sidewalk seating and an attached apartment building. It would eliminate the eight existing onsite parking spots.

Staff has determined that no variance is necessary for the removal of the parking since the project’s applicants propose relocating it to 2020 Bancroft Way, within 700 feet of the proposed project. A total of nine parking spots would be created, along with providing eco passes and valet parking to make up for the lack of additional parking.

The Muse Art House

Zoning staff will be back with more information about the proposed Muse Art House and Mint Cafe on 2525 Telegraph Ave.

ZAB voted 6-2 to approve the restaurant and an art gallery in the former location of the Blue Nile Restaurant, but did not grant the requested permits for distilled spirits and expansion of hours at the site.

Ali Eslami, the owner of the proposed cafe, told the Planet he might not open since ZAB turned down his request to stay open until 2 a.m. on weekends and midnight on weekdays in response to neighborhood concerns about noise and rowdiness. The board ruled the cafe could remain open until midnight on weekends and 10 p.m. on weekdays.

Opinion

Editorials

On Wednesday I had a rare opportunity to sit in a chair at an undisclosed location in the country for a couple of hours. I took along the New Yorker which had just arrived in my mailbox and my reading glasses, as well as some binoculars in case any birds showed up.

The birds appeared right on cue, or should I say on queue, taking turns to sip out of a trickling fountain, because it was a hot day. As a very occasional bird watcher, I don’t call most of them by name. Hummingbirds, jays and chickadees, yes, but I haven’t had formal introductions to most of the others, sometimes grouped by the British as “little brown birds.” With the aid of my spyglasses, I discovered that some of the ones that looked brown to my naked aging eyes are a riot of colors and patterns. A particularly assertive crowd at the water source was divided into two groups, probably along gender lines: some bright chrome yellow and some subtle olive green, with a strong black and white pattern on their wings. The Stellar’s jays were hard to miss: bigger, louder, flashier and much pushier than any of the others. I saw one or two specimens of an elegant two-tone gray bird that I don’t remember seeing before. Probably since it’s fall there were travellers in the group hanging around the water cooler, on their way to their own personal undisclosed locations for the winter.

All in all, the birds were a treat, but the New Yorker was a major disappointment. It turned out to be the “Style” issue, with piece after piece loaded down with expensive brand names. If the brand owners didn’t pay handsomely for product placement, as they now do for movies and television, the Conde Nast corporation, which owns the New Yorker, wuz robbed.

The best/worst of the lot was a hagiography of the editor of one of the many self-referential Manhattan pop culture mags, described by the New Yorker writer as being somewhat zine-like, but not exactly. Every detail of her (quite pedestrian) daily life was explored in breathless prose, down to the bowl of cherries always on her coffee table. The name of every person now enjoying 15 minutes of fame who hangs out with her was dropped. It was a fascinating piece in a horrifying way, typical of a genre which has been around for many years, and has sometimes spawned whole publications, including the one its subject now manages.

Reading this story while occasionally glancing up to spot a bird, I was reminded of one of my favorite maxims. (This is a hazard of old age—there’s a strong temptation to reduce anything you might have learned over the years to a few pat phrases repeatedly endlessly to annoy your friends and family.) Maxim: “Styles come and go, but the avant-garde remains the same.”

And this particular avantgardiste seems to have it all down pat: primary colors, peculiar glasses, funky friends, the whole ball of wax, completely up to code for Manhattan-style then and now, for at least the past 50 years. She is described as having migrated from the Jersey burbs to Wash U in St. Louis to L.A. to downtown NYC, a classic trajectory dating back to the 1920s at least.

The most interesting information in the piece is that the editor in question (and by extension her division of the avant-garde) seems to have adopted a number of the standard features of late-’50s California Upper Bohemia as markers of what is lauded as her trendy signature style. The writer gushes on and on about her Heath pottery and Marimekko fabrics, obviously unaware that they were the automatic choice of a whole generation of Mrs. Robinsons in Marin and the Berkeley hills. On the plus side of the ledger, the piece publicizes the editor’s support for the East Bay’s beloved Creative Growth organization, the workshop for developmentally disabled artists which has produced marvelous art for at least 30 years, but is hardly a new discovery.

Which brings us back to the birds. One moral I derived from reading these style pieces while watching the birds (morals: another hazard for grandmothers) is that birds are forever stylish without even trying, while humans work hard at being stylish and often fail. No dress described in the New Yorker was anything like as handsome as the greenish birds with the striped wings or the Stellar’s jays.

And there’s a political lesson to be learned too. Solutions to perceived problems, come in cycles just as hemlines do. This analysis thrust itself on me as I got back to work on Thursday morning and read the press release about the hearing on Saturday which has been called to discuss the mayor’s latest plans for disappearing the poor folks from downtown Berkeley. It’s been about eight years since the last time he and the then-mayor tried it, but the plans are pretty much the same as they were then.

The mayor himself seems to have made up his mind long ago. He made it clear in a KPFA interview that he generally tries to avoid Berkeley’s beggars, and he’ll miss the hearing. He’s adding to his carbon footprint with yet another European junket, but the rest of us are invited to the North Berkeley Senior Center to talk about what to do, as if it were an open question. You can be sure that large butcher paper tablets and markers to write on them will be in evidence, along with wastebaskets to put the results in afterwards.

A few merchants will respond to an invitation from the Downtown Berkeley Association to attend and shake their fists. Civil libertarians will object to proposed restrictions on speech. Those who try to help the homeless and disturbed people who annoy their housed and complacent fellow citizens will talk about how hard their job is, especially since the budget for the remedies they offer has been slashed.

All speakers will agree that decent public bathrooms would be nice. Parking charges will be raised to pay for them, but the money will be used for something else. The crazy person with the giant stuffed Snoopy who’s been trying to sleep behind my garage since being rousted from Telegraph will move on eventually.

Nothing will change. In another eight or 10 years, perhaps sooner, we’ll do it all again. That’s fashion, Berkeley-style.

There’s been a completely unnecessary uproar over MoveOn’s ad about General Petraeus. It almost makes one wonder if there isn’t some Cointelpro-like infiltration going on in the anti-war movement, except that I know that people like us can always manage to shoot ourselves in the foot with no help from anyone. What’s unnecessary about it?

Well, there’s a rule that everyone should have to master in order to get out of the 7th grade: never make fun of anyone’s name, face or family if you want to be thought of as one of the good guys. There’s a “nyanh nyanh nuh nyanh nyanh” tone to calling the admittedly creepy fellow General Betray-us that strips all dignity from the complaints about him. It makes the protesters seem juvenile, when in fact their point is deadly serious.

MoveOn supporters confounded the problem after the ad appeared. Clicking on “the thinking behind the ad” on the MoveOn site produced this pseudo-academic explanation: “The language of the ad was intended to be both hard-hitting and catchy. The truth about the mainstream media is that the kind of analyses with which some of us feel more comfortable don’t generate enough attention or news coverage to shift the debate. Phrases like “General Betray Us” are “sticky”—that is, they get repeated again and again in the media—because they are so memorable. It was precisely because this ad was controversial and the language in it was ‘sticky’ that the allegations at its core were widely discussed.”

In fact, the ad’s copywriters were too clever by half. The core allegations got lost in the brouhaha over the “your mama” language they used. Being “in your face” is a lot of fun, but it changes few minds.

The problem stems from a confusion that first surfaced in a big way when the counter-culture and the protests against the war in Vietnam both came to a boil at the same point in time. The Summer of Love and its offspring were mostly about self-actualization, or at least about self-expression, whereas political protest is or should be mostly about changing minds and thus policies. A good argument can be made, and was made at the time, that adding the dimension of acting out differences between the baby boomers and the dominant culture slowed down rather than speeded up the goal of ending the war. I know, that seems like heresy today.

Not, of course, that proper behavior necessarily works either. Some of us in the last pre-boomer cohort began our political careers in the most careful way, doing our best to please while making our political points. The first big demonstration in the ’60s took place when 5,000 people (an amazing number in those days) ringed San Francisco City Hall, where the House Committee on Un-American Activities, commonly known as HUAC, was grilling suspected Communists and fellow travelers with the goal of ruining their lives by every means possible. Perfect ladies, we wore—hard to believe now, but there’s film to prove it—hats, gloves and high heels on the picket line. And the city fathers still felt free to turn on the firehouses and wash the demonstrators down the long marble staircase in City Hall.

But the movie that HUAC made about the event, Operation Abolition, backfired. It toured college campuses where it was greeted with jeers and catcalls, and made a major contribution to radicalizing the next decade’s college students. And it wasn’t the outrageous acts depicted in the film, which as I recall were few, but the contrast between the civil demeanor of the protesters and the violent reaction to them which made the point.

The commemoration this week of the integration of the Little Rock schools 50 years ago is another case in point. The concentration and seriousness of the African American young people and their families made their slavering opponents look even worse. The success of the civil rights movement, limited of course but very real as far it went, was materially aided by the consistent dignity of the activists. It would have been a serious mistake for them to lapse into making fun of the names or faces of their opponents.

It’s true that making fun of the enemy in moderation helps the good guys keep up the fight. The choir needs a little encouragement to keep on singing, but the congregation will never grow if that’s all the preacher does. The San Francisco Mime Troupe has thrived on ridicule, but they are most successful in Bay Area parks and on college campuses, and their best offerings have managed to combine humor with pathos. They don’t try putting on their shows uninvited in parks in, say, Memphis, nor should they. Jon Stewart is the favorite news source of people who stay up late—a whole new generation of students, not to mention my mother, now almost 93—but his brand of humor wouldn’t come across the same way if it ran as an ad in a metro daily in most of the country.

And cultural self-expression that isn’t even funny is particularly perilous. The Weathermen’s Days of Rage running amok in Chicago just prolonged the agony of the Vietnam War. (It now seems odd, among many things that are hard to understand about what went on in those days, that they weren’t called the Weatherpersons.)

The outcry over building the new gym/office building next to UC’s Memorial Stadium has gotten a lot of publicity because of its tree-sitting component. It has garnered a respectable cohort of supporters, including some notable and serious “old birds in the trees,” but it’s constantly at risk of being considered frivolous because some protesters are more concerned with acting out their differences with the dominant culture than with converting opponents. Success will probably come, if it does at all, in a court of law rather than in the court of public opinion.

The most pointless aspect of L’Affaire Betray-Us is the after-the-fact parsing of the criticisms of the ad by the presidential candidates. I don’t remember any of the senators saying that they objected to the form of the ad, but not to its content, which is what they should have said, but maybe I missed it. It’s impossible to remember the substance or wording of the conflicting resolutions, who said what about which phrase, but the bottom line is that making juvenile fun of the guy’s name just gifted him with undeserved victim status, and drove the substantive problems with his report off the front page. And that’s too bad.

Public Comment

My name is Lynn Tidd and I am Chris Kavanagh’s landlord. This is unfortunate. I never intended to be a landlord. Six months ago I bought a house a block away from my mother-in-law, in which to live with my large blended family of five children ranging in ages 3 to 23.

Chris Kavanagh and Johnny Spain were served owner move-in evictions. They both wanted to negotiate. Johnny wanted money, Chris wanted to live there another year. I just want my house.

I am a long-time Green Party member. I am not coached by anyone and am new to the neighborhood after moving here from the suburbs to raise my children in a neighborhood that seems to match our family’s values a bit more. I am not a good government type, or a venal landlord, just a mom who wants to raise her kids in her own house. I don’t want tenants.

I was thrilled to see Chris in handcuffs. I have lived with his smug, entitled presence in my backyard for six months. A weekend off of his lurking about and the possibility of justice being served was thrilling to me. His infrequent appearances were notable after he had been a constant presence at the house. The explanation? It appears Chris finally found a job.

I can’t wait until this is over and I can let my children play in my backyard.

Lynn Tidd

•

KAVANAGH AND THE RENT BOARD

Editors, Daily Planet:

Now that Chris Kavanagh, Berkeley Rent Board member, has been arrested and charged with several felonies, one must ask the obvious question: How can it be that his friends and cohorts on the Rent Board were unaware of his deceit? Here is an agency that spends millions of dollars a year keeping track of ‘who lives where’ but they failed to note Mr. Kavanagh’s questionable residency claim? Perhaps it is time for the grand jury to look into this!

One notes that the owners of the Oakland home where Kavanagh resides have already paid out $10,000 to another tenant for the “privilege of living in their own property.” Such extorted funds are regularly paid to tenants thanks to Bay Area rent and eviction laws that support a virtual industry of extortion.

When I referred to these payouts as “extortion” to a Berkeley tenant’s attorney he did not object to the characterization but quipped “That’s how things are done in Berkeley.” Of course, he was in line to collect 33 percent of the take from my client, a single mother with a moderate income unable to move into her own home.

Point is, rent control and eviction laws in Berkeley and Oakland are not about justice and fairness but rather about the blind, wholesale entitlement of tenants at the expense of a falsely demonized group, property owners. It is a tired class delineation based on an erroneous ideology.

Kavanagh has been a mouthpiece for this uninspected ideology which, unfortunately is regularly disguised in “progressive” rhetoric. But there is nothing progressive about a system that generalizes and demonizes, a system unable or unwilling to ever turn a critical eye upon itself.

True “progressives” honor the rule of law, fair elections, and open-mindedness. Kavanagh made it clear a long time ago that open-mindedness is not one of his virtues. Apparently he doesn’t think much of the rule of law or fair elections either.

This is the latest corruption case brought to you by Berkeley’s affordable housing machinery, all good “progressives” with “high ideals” apparently willing to violate the law as often as they violate common sense. Pretty soon we should realize that policy should be built on sound and fair principles not ideologies. Government needs to work to protect the interest of all citizens equally, not pit one group against another.

Kavanagh will have his day in court. Until then, he is presumed innocent. I only hope, for his sake, that his judges be more open minded and fair than the one-sided, prejudicial rent board he serves on.

John Koenigshofer

•

FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY REPEALED IN BERKELEY

Editors, Daily Planet:

4:15 p.m., Wednesday Sept. 12, by the BART entrance at Shattuck and Allston Way: Six or seven black teenagers are socializing on a sunny afternoon after school, leaning on their bikes, laughing. Behind them, two Berkeley police are leaning on their bicycles, staring at the young men in a studied, menacing manner, for what must have been 10 minutes.

I had to rub my eyes. Suddenly, without any provocation, Officers Jeremiason (Badge 94) and M. Meredith (Badge 102) moved in on the young men, aggressively manhandling them, threatening to issue citations for various offenses including, if you can believe it, “having a bicycle on the sidewalk.”

There was plenty of cop-drama lip: “You have a problem with your hearing?” etc. Finally, after four or five more police had appeared on the scene, two of the young men were handcuffed and driven away.

What’s going on here? Since when has it been against the law for youth to congregate on the streets of this town? These are our streets—we have a right to use them.

The national trend of criminalizing young people, particularly black and Latino youth; the national epidemic of out-of-control police—have these come to roost in Berkeley? We need to come together and take a stand on this important issue.

David Welsh

•

TAKE A DEEP BREATH, DOUG

Editors, Daily Planet:

To Doug Buckwald: Doug, I don’t think you are a bad person and I really hope you mean it when you talk about compromise and finding middle ground. But I find it hard to believe that if the university wins in court that the tree sitters will vacate the trees and leave peacefully. If the university loses so be it. I agree life is not black or white but that is how your first commentary came across, us vs. them. Take a deep breath Doug and I will gladly buy you a glass of Zinfandel one of these days.

Oh, and before every football game a video is played asking all Bear fans to treat our visitors with dignity and respect. Good night and good luck.

Matthew Shoemaker

•

HOUSING FOR THE POOR

Editors, Daily Planet:

The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported that the real estate market is hot for $65 million mansions in San Francisco, tempting all those discerning billionaires. I can tell you that the market is much hotter for low-income, non-billionaires. Working recently with one stalwart Berkeley resident, a long-time volunteer at our local park, senior and pretty sick, we’re having a heck of a time finding even the tiniest place where she can lay her head each night and have a little meal. Waiting lists for people like her—no family, on a small fixed income, too aged and ill to work—are so long as to be a joke. Her prospects, the street or the city shelter if there is room, will surely do her in. Meanwhile, that discerning billionaire, perhaps one of those who needs to add a 31st house to the 30 he already has, will drop $65 million and come up with an additional $10 million to customize that mansion to an adequate level of comfort and luxury. Where the dickens is Dickens when you need him?

Linda Maio

Berkeley City Councilmember, District 1

•

WALK AND ROLL TO SCHOOL

Editors, Daily Planet:

We call the club TOP—why? because they are Thousand Oaks Pedalers, so the acronym works, but also they are kids ages 5 to 10 that start at the bottom of the Berkeley flats and ride up the hill one or two miles to Thousand Oaks Elementary School to arrive in time for a 8 a.m. bell. For them and their families this means leaving at 7:30 a.m. every day, something several parents thought they could not do for a school bus, but now offered true community, health benefits for aging and growing bodies, life lessons, independent transportation options for those who will soon enough be adolescents, and meaningful family time they are rising a little earlier and making the bell. And along they way they are reducing greenhouse gas emissions and roadway congestion—gifts these children can proudly claim to willingly, even joyfully, give their community. Some of the kids drag their parents out to ride—others get dressed a little faster so they can ride, when before they dragged through the morning ritual.

Why are they doing it? Maybe the national creed of Safe Routes to School rings all too true: “When it is safe, kids should ride or walk, when its not, our community needs to work to make it safe.” These kids cross Gilman, Marin and Solano through morning rush hour commutes. Their mothers watch carefully and hope that you will too, and they hope too you might slow down for the little riders, their wheels are, after all, rather small.

Wednesday, Oct. 3 is International Walk or Roll to School Day, and TOP is planning to be out in force recruiting new members and taking to the streets with the rest of the Walking School Buses and Bike Trains spanning Berkeley in multiple participating elementary schools. Have kids in school? Walk, bike or carpool with them to school this day it can be the first of many new habits that stall Global Warming and add sanity to your day. Live by a school? Come out and watch over those crazier crossings, it will be safer for you too, if everyone slows down and looks around. Commute by a school? Please slow down, look out for the shortest of riders and walkers and give the kids a break—they are trying to improve our community for all of us.

Amber Evans

•

CODE OF SILENCE

Editors, Daily Planet:

In response to Laura Menard’s Sept. 18 letter: As a parent of a 19-year-old and a 16-year-old, I would like to say she hit a number of things right on the head, but also missed a few important points.

Since the death of Juan Ramos last year, the safety parent group at El Cerrito High School has tried to address some of the very issues Ms. Menard brought up. We hosted an alcohol awareness night with guest speakers, and a child safety informational meeting with a judge and lawyer from the juvenile court system who agreed to come as guest speakers to address this and many other issues, and guess what, maybe five parents came to these informational meetings, and I’m being generous.

In El Cerrito, and WCCUSD, our public figures, school board, ECHS administration, and our superintendent of schools have recognized teen drinking, and teen violence as a major issue. The bigger issue here is why aren’t the parents? My kids have been a victims of the very “code of silence” Ms. Menard refers too, in fact as a parent so have I. The number of parents at our high school that think teen drinking is OK, sending your child off to a party not knowing if it is supervised is OK, or allowing them to roam the streets past curfew is OK, is appalling.

I wonder if the parents having these parties, or even the ones going out of town while they are occurring, realize that they can be held responsible for anything that happens at their home? Most likely the majority of parents think that these things are OK until something happens to their child. A good question would be how would these same parents feel if it was their house hosting a party while they were gone? If parents are unwilling to work together, to talk to each other, check up on the parties our kids are attending, and discuss reasons why it is not OK to do these things with our kids then this issue will never be completely resolved. We do need to make these things more public and publicly address the issues with each other, our children, and our local government. Your son did the right thing, and I believe my kids would too. Unfortunately they are part of the minority.

Michele Jawad

El Ceritto High School

PTSA Safety Chair

•

BRT AND DEMOCRACY

Editors, Daily Planet:

I don’t know Steve Geller, but I certainly see his letters in the Daily Planet often and can figure out he supports Bus Rapid Transit.

Steve, I am the “somebody” who suggested in a letter to this paper that BRT be placed on the ballot so as to gauge if the good citizens of Berkeley really support BRT.

We may not agree on BRT but I certainly hope that, your sarcasm notwithstanding, you do believe in democracy and the will of the people.

Frank K. Greenspan

•

BRT DEBATE IS AHEAD OF THE DECISION PROCESS

Editors, Daily Planet:

Recent weeks have seen a flurry of public arguments both in favor of and opposed to the Bus Rapid Transit proposal in Berkeley. While such debate is healthy, it is also largely premature. The decision on whether or not to build BRT in Berkeley is not imminent, so the premature focus on that final decision has obscured what the city actually needs to do in the next few months—get all the information and analysis possible for a decision that may still be a year away.

The current need is simply to help AC Transit complete the final environmental impact report, which will be used as the reference document when we make the actual project decisions. In order for AC Transit to do that, the Berkeley City Council needs to select its “preferred local alternative” (PLA)—the scenario that will receive the most study and attention in the final EIR document. Along with the PLA, the final EIR will also consider alternatives (including a “no build” alternative), as well as describe potential mitigations for any negative impacts which the project might create.

Thus the task of the council over the next few months is simply to select the Berkeley PLA, not yet vote the project up or down. So the question to ask is, “what is the most helpful PLA at this point?” Since the no build alternative is automatically considered, what’s needed is a choice of the alternatives which would make the most sense IF the BRT project were to be built.

The point is important: The council will only be choosing what to study most closely, not deciding whether or not to build. Selecting a central “build” alternative will not signify that it will be approved next year. So the council will be setting up a process to best help the PLA selection—once again probably centered in the Transportation Commission. That process will look closely at the alternatives that have been most controversial so far—mainly the different proposed routings and station options for the proposed BRT segments on Telegraph, Bancroft and in the downtown core—and will recommend choices to the council. Again the narrow focus should only be on which of these alternatives would best benefit from intensive study, in the context of other possibilities for those same segments. There will be no recommendation before the council on the overall worthiness of the project at this point.

The best advice to the City Council is therefore to keep the process narrow and focused rather than open-ended and diffuse. Concerns of council members such as Kriss Worthington about some wider issues—for example, extending improved bus service down University or encouraging bus ridership via subsidized passes—are certainly legitimate and worthy of study. But they are not germane to the decision before us now—which BRT choices make the most sense to study further? It’s therefore time to tone down the hysteria for awhile at least, and to focus on what best helps us make a wise decision next year. For now that’s doing a great job choosing an informative preferred local alternative we can all scrutinize together. The cities of Oakland and San Leandro—also with proposed BRT projects—are making their PLA choices with little controversy. Berkeley should, for once, be able to do the same.

Alan Tobey

•

AC TRANSIT

Editors, Daily Planet:

I absolutely applaud the latest investigative piece by J. Douglas Allen-Taylor on the very controversial AC Transit Van Hool bus purchase. It appears that AC Transit General Manager Rick Fernandez has been a naughty boy indeed. Thank you Mr. Allen-Taylor for using a FOIA document request to uncover how Mr. Fernandez made a statement about this plan to the AC Transit Board that, as Mr. Allen-Taylor graciously put it “...may not be true..,” and got away with it.

This story is jaw-dropping. It concerns a huge purchase of new busses that we do not need and that riders and drivers dislike intensely (e.g., the seats are tiny and force riders to face each other with knees touching), from a foreign manufacturer at the expense of business and jobs suffered by a local manufacturer. Now, thanks only to the Daily Planet, we have discovered that Mr. Fernandez is frantically back-filling with the FTC and MTA to cover his obfuscating, incomplete and misleading reports to the Board regarding the underlying financial facts of the deal, including that he has no good answer for the source of rebates of millions of dollars of previous grant money that must be repaid now to the federal government, and which are owed only because Mr. Fernandez was hell-bent for leather to close this Van Hool purchase immediately. Except for Board President Greg Harper who last March had the good sense to vote against what now appears to be some kind of caper by Mr. Fernandez, the AC Transit Board of Directors were asleep at the wheel. What happens to an AC Transit driver who does that?

I sincerely hope Mr. Allen-Taylor will continue his great work, and eventually find out what is at the bottom of this. Who knows, he may sufficiently embarrass the AC Transit Board of Directors into carrying out their duty to discover why Mr. Fernandez schemed and obfuscated the financial facts to push this Van Hool purchase through, especially when the riders hate them.

Dennis J. White

•

GREEN FOOD WASTE BINS

Editors, Daily Planet:

It will be interesting to see how the green kitchen waste cans the city recently provided to homeowners actually work over time. Despite the positive effect of reducing landfill volume and recycling nutrients as compost, several factors may need further thought:

1. For as long as the city has provided yard waste collections, some plant residue remains on streets after collection. The collectors are careful and work hard. But inevitably bits and pieces of yard waste are left behind to end up in gutters and storm sewers. With yard waste alone, the nuisance factor is minute. With food wastes now included, such residues may well attract rodents and small animals. Is the city monitoring this effect? If so, how?

2. Keeping the small green containers clean requires water. More water than used before the cans were distributed will be needed to keep these containers clean. Keeping cans clean and conserving water are contradictory. And water used in these cans should not be used on outdoor plantings as it will contain residues that will attract rodents.

3. Where are these containers to be stored? Under the sink? No room. On top of break-the-bank-newly-installed marble, granite, and limestone counters? Definitely not aesthetically compatible with such modern amenities. Or, on kitchen decks, vulnerable to raccoon attacks?

Thoughts, ideas, and experience-to-date all sought.

Barbara Witte

•

SPINAL INJURIES

Editors, Daily Planet:

Thank you, John Smith, for your eloquent commentary on the anniversary of the introduction of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Act, a bill that has still not yet been passed, after five-years in Congress (“Searching for a Cure for Spinal Injuries,” Sept. 25).

I am the president of the Well Spouse Association (http://wellspouse.org), a group that offers support to husbands, wives or partners of people with chronic illness and/or disability. Over ten percent of our members are caring for spouses with disabilities. They, and the WSA support this bill, which potentially could lead to a lot more effective treatment for spinal cord injuries. We also support the work of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, and its Paralysis Resource Center (http://paralysis.org).

Richard Anderson

President, Well Spouse Association

Freehold, NJ

•

CLIMATE CHANGE

AND BERKELEY

Editors, Daily Planet:

It’s about time we had a good tongue-in-cheek lashing commentary like Edna Spector’s Sept. 25 exposition on Berkeley’s leadership role in the “voluntary extinction of the human race.” Then again, perhaps she is serious? But not to worry. I’m sure Berkeley, in it’s inimitable way, will take credit for either victory or defeat. After all, we’ve been on the cutting edge of so much technological and social change for the last half-century, why not give up the ghost and surrender to failure, rather than admit that “the revolution” has gone amuck....not just in Washington, but in our own backyard, as well.

Marc Winokur

•

SLOW NEWS DAY?

Editors, Daily Planet:

“No, the time for bolder self-sacrifice has arrived. The only real, long term hope for the eco-sphere is a massive human population collapse, hopefully leading to the voluntary extinction of the human race. Already, a new urgency and groundswell of support is building for the idea that humans are a type of super toxin which the planet cannot sustain or support in the longterm.”

Methinks that Edna has watched The Matrix too many times. I also think she needs some serious psychological professional help. Also I sincerely hope that Edna is the first to volunteer for self eradication, if she continues down this path.

I am frightened that the Berkeley Daily Planet would print and by proxy advocate the eradication of the human race. Please tell me that it was a slow news day.

Hal Grisham

•

FUZZY LOGIC

Editors, Daily Planet:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked Congress to allocate $190 billion for war next year and President Bush threatens to veto a five-year $35 billion expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Is war in a distant land more important than the children of American? Bush and Republicans seem to think so. The insurance bill passed in the House 265-159. Who were the 151 “family values” Republicans that put party ideology ahead of 10 million American children?

George W. Bush and Republicans live in an upside-down world of fuzzy logic.

Ron Lowe

Grass Valley

•

WORLD ANIMAL WEEK

Editors, Daily Planet:

As a pet guardian and Berkeley resident, I am grateful to live in a city that values the well-being of animals. In that regard, I would like to share with my fellow residents that Oct. 4–10 is World Animal Week, a global event uniting the world in celebration of animals and aiming to raise the profile of animal welfare worldwide. This week is your chance to help make the world a safer, more compassionate place for all animals. There is no limit to what you can do for World Animal Week; the important thing is to take part.

The World Society for the Protection of Animals offers a few simple suggestions of ways people can celebrate this event and make the world a better place for animals:

1. Help reduce animal overpopulation by adopting your next animal companion from a shelter or rescue group instead of buying from a breeder or pet store—and get your new friend spayed or neutered.

3. Create a haven for wildlife in your backyard by providing appropriate habitat and find ways to control “nuisance” animals humanely.

4. Make more humane food choices by purchasing organic, free range, pasture raised and humane food labels; make an effort to reduce the amount of meat and other animal products in your diet.

5. Buy cruelty-free products like cosmetics and household cleaners that haven’t been tested on animals.

6. Reduce your consumption of non-renewable energy resources and recycle as much packaging and waste products as possible.

7. Never buy gifts or souvenirs that involve the cruel death of an animal or are made from endangered species. Avoid establishments that keep wild animals in captivity, including roadside zoos or other venues that house captive wild animals for entertainment.

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) has been argued and debated ever since AC Transit unveiled a proposal for a BRT project between Berkeley, Oakland and San Leandro. The subject has polarized the community into pro-BRT and anti-BRT factions—and, of course, those who have never heard of it. It is therefore timely to provide some guidance on how to analyze this proposal—and others like it.

This article consists of two parts: the first defines and describes BRT from the points of view of the passenger, the bus operating agency, and the general public. For more details on BRT generally, look up “Bus Rapid Transit” at Wikipedia.org. The second part considers the AC Transit proposal specifically. For more details about this project see the draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) at www.actransit.org. The DEIS is dated May 2007.

Minimizing Travel Time—That’s What It’s All About

The passenger: When we travel, the trip is not the purpose; getting to the destination is what matters, and we try to minimize the time it takes. We also often make allowances for being delayed if the highway might be congested, the bus might be late, or other possible events make the trip time estimate unreliable. In urban transit systems, “trip time” consists of:

• The access time—how long it takes us to get to the bus stop and, at the other end, to walk from the bus stop to our destination.

• The waiting time at the stop for the bus arrival.

• The in-vehicle time—the number of minutes we are on the bus.

Reliability is a measure of how well the bus can keep to its schedule; high reliability means that passengers can arrive at the stop just before the bus gets there; low reliability increases waiting time because the bus may be late.

BRT can improve both in-vehicle time and reliability by providing the bus some or all of the following: exclusive lanes or roadways, fewer stops, priority at signals, fast boarding and alighting via platforms with a height that is even with the bus floors and/or use of low-floor buses, and fare payment off the vehicle. But BRT is likely to add to passengers’ access times, because the longer spacing between stops imposes longer walking distances to and from them. The result, as we learned from studying trips made on BART with its long station spacing and high speed and reliability, is that persons with long trips are attracted, but those making short trips remain on the local service or in their cars.

The bus operator: The cost of operating a bus route consists of drivers’ wages and benefits, fuel, maintenance, and insurance. The driver typically accounts for 75 percent of the total. Drivers are paid by the hour, not by the number of miles they drive. The faster a bus can travel, the more productive the driver will be. (It costs somewhere upwards of $100,000 per year to operate, maintain, and insure a bus.) It is therefore in the interest of the bus operator to increase speeds and minimize time spent at stops. The latter can be achieved by allowing passengers to enter and exit through any door, paying their fares—if they do not have monthly passes—at ticket vending machines at the stops.

If reliability is low, some buses will arrive at the end of the line late. To avoid these vehicles leaving late on the return journey, the operator schedules “recovery time” at the terminal. This will often require extra buses to be assigned and increase operating costs substantially.

It is therefore in the bus operator’s interest to welcome BRT installations. Even accounting for minor items, such as the costs of maintaining bus stops, ticket vending machines, and electronic next-bus-arrival signs, the operating costs will be reduced. (Modifying and maintaining the new traffic signal hardware—described below—may be paid by the city.)

But then there are one-time capital costs. BRT infrastructure can range from relatively minor investments (San Pablo Avenue locally, Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles) to hundreds of millions of dollars (bus freeways in Pittsburgh, Penn., transitways in Ottawa, exclusive roadways with guide rails in Adelaide). Capital funds will be needed for new buses, and for expansion of maintenance and overnight bus parking facilities.

The general public: Little needs to be said here; the ongoing debate has already brought many issues to the surface. On the plus side there is the new option of a fast, reliable service that might entice some present motor vehicle drivers to switch to public transit. On the negative side may be an adverse impact on street traffic, on parking, and perhaps on retail establishments that depend on nearby parking. Another negative factor could be the postponement of other transportation improvement projects, if capital funds were diverted from them to BRT.

The Route 1R BRT Project:

The AC Transit Board of Directors has before it the BRT project draft environmental impact statement (DEIS), which offers four alternatives. The board will select one of these as the locally preferred alternative (LPA) next April. The numerical data quoted here is the range of values over all four alternatives. The BRT project is proposed between downtown and UC Berkeley and San Leandro or Bay Fair and includes:

• Two center traffic lanes converted for exclusive BRT use on Telegraph Avenue and International Boulevard/East 14th Street.

• Stops spaced a quarter-mile to a half-mile apart, each furnished with two boarding platforms, a shelter, benches, ticket vending machines, real-time next-bus-arrival signs, and security equipment (cameras?). These stops will be in the center of the street; their width will require the traffic and bike lanes to be brought to the curb, eliminating parking at these locations.

• Preemption hardware at traffic signals and in the buses to be used in this service. This hardware consists of a radio transmitter in each bus and a receiver at each signal. When a preempt message from a bus is received, the signal either holds the green if it is showing at this moment or switches to green as quickly as possible.

The new bus rapid route 1R will operate on this facility at headways of 3.6 to five minutes in peak hours and less frequently at other times. Two alternatives also include a local Route 1 that runs in the remaining traffic lanes; the other two do not.

The DEIS estimates that in 2025 total passengers in the corridor would range from 42,050 to 49,230 per weekday , and that of these from 4,580 to 9,230 would be new passengers after shifts from other routes have been accounted for.

Capital cost would be from $310 million to $400 million in 2005 dollars. The cost of new buses is included, but the need for, and cost of expanded maintenance and storage facilities is not mentioned. (Only about $100 million had been earmarked for the project by last May.) Operating and maintenance (O&M) costs would range from $35.5 millions to $39.4 millions per year in 2025. Fares would cover from 20 to 28 percent of O&M costs; the rest would have to be subsidized.

Evaluation

The benefit from this project would be that the better bus service on the Telegraph/International Boulevard route, would attract the new passengers, some of whom would have previously traveled by car. But there are many troubling aspects or disbenefits..

• Investment Priorities. Is the selected corridor really in such bad shape that a large investment is urgently needed? BART parallels the BRT route within less than a mile throughout the corridor and, while it has fewer stops, will continue to attract long trips because of its higher speed and reliability. Are there no other corridors where BRT or other urban transit investment would be more valuable?

• Facility Utilization: The dedicated lanes would be utterly underutilized at 1 bus every 3.6 to five minutes or 12-17 buses per hour per direction. It is highly likely that the empty lanes would soon be opened to carpools and hybrid automobiles, following the precedent that allows these vehicles on what were initially exclusive bus lanes on California freeways.

• Costs: The capital costs estimated in the DEIS are in 2005 dollars and are certain to inflate by the time construction is started in view of continually escalating construction costs. Only about $100 million had been identified as available in the DEIS six months ago. Subsidies to cover 74-80 percent of the annual O&M costs must also be found..

• Patronage Forecasts: The patronage numbers shown in the DEIS are not very impressive. The ratio of passengers to dollars of investment will be the lowest of any BRT system in North America.

• Traffic forecast. Substantial reduction in motor vehicle traffic is, I believe, wishful thinking. The city of Berkeley has for many years had a policy of encouraging commuters working at the University and downtown to use Telegraph Avenue en route from or to the Route 24 freeway and the Caldecott Tunnel. This was done to relieve congestion on alternate routes, such as College Avenue and Warring/Derby. Route 1R offers nothing to commuters living in Central Contra Costa County, unless they are willing to detour via 40th Street/Telegraph and MacArthur BART. Loss of a pair of lanes on Telegraph will increase congestion and the anger of residents on parallel streets where backups are already formidable. The DEIS identifies 27 intersections (four in Berkeley) where traffic demand will exceed capacity.

• Traffic Flow and Safety. Restricted to one lane per direction, traffic would flow in a constant stream during peak hours with pedestrians unable to cross except at signalized intersections. Local Route 1 buses (only in two alternatives) would be in this stream and would block its progress every time they stop to discharge or pick up passengers. Left turns would have to be prohibited at most intersections to prevent turning vehicles from blocking the BRT roadway. Vehicles would infiltrate residential streets and make three right turns to go to the left. In sum, traffic would be slow—stop-and-go at times—and exhaust emissions would increase.

There is also a potential safety problem at each BRT stop, because passengers must cross a traffic lane when walking to or from the loading platform.

• Parking: The loss of parking spaces along the route is, perhaps, the most contentious issue of all. Merchants always express concern when a single space at the curb is lost. The space needed for the remaining traffic lane and probably the bike lane to pass by each stop platform can only be gained by removing parking. The DEIS shows that from 945 to 1,300 spaces would have to be moved or lost. A proposal to replace them, together with their meters, on side streets, most of which are residential, is understandably unpopular.

Conclusion

What, then, might be done in this corridor? Modest investment to further improve Route 1R is warranted; the 72R Project on San Pablo Avenue is a good guide to follow. Use low-floor buses exclusively and equip them and traffic signal controllers with preemption hardware. Make such other traffic engineering improvements as will assist buses to pass chronic bottlenecks—this will also benefit local buses. Install next-bus-arrival signs at selected stops. Introduce Proof-of-Payment fares, so that all doors of buses can be used by entering as well as exiting passengers, thus reducing time stopped at each bus station. And delete the exclusive roadway and its center-of-the-road stations from the project.

If, after this limited BRT program has been fully implemented, the experience with Route 1R is satisfactory, some of the money saved can then be used for other projects; e.g., BRT in the MacArthur Boulevard corridor, an extension of Route 1R to Amtrak at Third Street and University Avenue. Such a program would fit the most cost-effective components of BRT to the demand and geography of the inner East Bay, would cause minimum disruption to commerce and traffic in the corridors that BRT traverses, would be much more likely to be fully funded, and would meet most of the goals that the project addressed at the outset. And—perhaps most important of all—there would be no reason for opposing it.

Wolfgang Homburger was a research engineer at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies from 1955 to 1990, and assistant director from 1984-to 1990. He specialized in traffic engineering and public transportation systems.

Thank you for publishing my letter on Sept. 21 regarding Steve Barton and the mess he leaves behind.

Unfortunately, there was a significant typo which took much of the meaning out of the paragraph dealing with Eleanor Walden. She told the Rent Board (in writing) that she had lived in her rent controlled apartment on Milvia for 20 years, not for 2 years as the printed version has it. Since Walden has benefited from Section 8 vouchers at Derby Street since 1997, that twenty year residence at Milvia is very significant.

Thank you again. I appreciate the Planet’s willingness to publish the opinions of all parts of the population, even when they may run counter to your own editorial views.

David M. Wilson

•

KAVANAGH INNOCENT UNTIL

PROVEN OTHERWISE

Editors, Daily Planet:

The media has made a lot of glib comparisons between the situation of Berkeley Rent Board Commissioner Chris Kavanagh and San Francisco Supervisor Ed Jew and even though Jew is accused of far more serious crimes, both he and Chris are still innocent until proven otherwise and deserve their day in court.

The difference is that Ed Jew was able to appear at the Hall of Justice for a quick booking and release, while Kavanagh, a civic-minded citizen and not in hiding (he attended a rent board meeting last week), was reported on by the 63rd street landlord and subjected to the humiliation of being handcuffed in public and dragged away. He is lucky the DA didn’t set up a perp walk to further the humiliation.

Landlord Lynn Tidd has been quoted, gloating that she alerted the cops because, “he had been observed there infrequently over the last couple of weeks.” Could this mean maybe he doesn’t live there? And Tidd said she “had the pleasure of seeing him arrested.” I guess there is more than one way to win an eviction fight. I doubt she is a good-government type, probably just another venal landlord, seeking any excuse to evict a tenant. I wonder; is she being advised by the Berkeley landlord mafia who’ve been out to gut the Rent Board for years?

Regardless of what Kavanagh’s housing situation is, he still deserves respect for his work on behalf of an endangered Berkeley species, low- to middle-income renters, and if he found himself in a difficult housing struggle, it should be seen as an example to every renter in the San Francisco Bay Area, still the hottest real estate (and displacement) market in the west.

And before we demand our pound of flesh, let him have his day in court.

Hank Chapot

Oakland

•

OAKLAND UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT: ACCOUNTABILITY AND AUDITS

Editors, Daily Planet:

As the independently elected performance auditors of the cities of Oakland and Berkeley, we would like to congratulate the Oakland Unified School District Board for taking an important step towards enhanced governance and accountability.

That step was the creation of an Audit Committee independent of management, and the appointment of three board members and four community members.

The Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) recommended this step some years ago. Independent audit committees are now required for publicly traded companies, and highly recommended for local government agencies. Typical audit committee oversight responsibilities include:

• Selecting (or recommending to the board) the commercial accounting firm who performs the annual financial statement audit and monitoring the work of those auditors.

• Quality and timely financial and compliance reporting.

• Examining, supporting, and reporting to the board regarding accounting and business controls (internal controls) to safeguard assets, ensure compliance and avoid fraud.

• Directing special investigations for the governing body.

• If the organization has an independent staff audit function, providing support and oversight for those auditors.

We would like to offer the School Board our support and assistance in taking this important step forward.

FCMAT also recommended establishing an independent staff audit function “supervised by an independent body, such as an audit committee.” We also suggest that the board continue to consider establishing an independent performance audit function. Government auditing is a cornerstone of good public sector governance. Performance auditors, financial statement auditors, and inspector generals increase your ability to hold government accountable.

Additional support and information about local government auditors is available from the Association of Local Government Auditors (ALGA) at www.governmentauditors.org.

Ann-Marie Hogan,

Berkeley City Auditor

Courtney Ruby,

Oakland City Auditor

•

FOOTBALL OR FREE THE TREES?

Editors, Daily Planet:

To add to the “Save the Oaks” and “Don’t Build on the Fault Line” and not “on Sacred Burial Grounds,” I thought to add one more reason for disrupting the additional sports building on the UC Berkeley Campus.

In both UC Davis and now UC Berkeley sports construction is a major project for builders. UC Davis has a new expanded stadium, UC Berkeley must want to match it and the construction companies want to rake in more tax dollars.

When I remember the time I was an incoming graduate student at UC Berkeley the then-Chancellor Berdahl opened his welcoming speech with “You are the best and brightest.” It sounded military; nevertheless, I looked around and didn’t notice anyone that looked like a footballer midst the 150. Then I heard Ignacio Chapela, at that time a favorite researcher at the university, speak on how graduates should open their minds and mouths to ask all sorts of questions; it was the function of an important university. He had come from UNAM, Mexico’s prestigious school. I wondered if he went there because of the football team? If UC Berkeley is the “best of this and that” are football and sports arenas the factors that makes for an elite school? Do people who apply to—and the few who get into—Harvard go there because they have a humongous stadium?

I also thought to ask Lawrence Ferlinghetti if he went to the Sorbonne because of the football team?

R.G. Davis

San Francisco

•

TIME TO BACK OFF BRT?

Editors, Daily Planet:

After reading some of the letters here, one might think that the purpose of Bus Rapid Transit was to interfere with car traffic on Telegraph Avenue. I thought that BRT was supposed to reduce traffic, on Telegraph and elsewhere, by getting people to use the buses for more trips, instead of contributing to car congestion.

Now it looks like most of the car drivers of Berkeley don’t plan to become bus riders, so naturally they see BRT and its bus-lanes as an obstacle to their continued car use. Somebody suggested we put the BRT on the ballot. If we get a majority vote for banning BRT and continuing our car culture, Mayor Bates can write a letter to the feds suggesting they give their BRT money to some other district, because Berkeley doesn’t require better bus service.

Also, if the mayor knows the cars are going to continue to spew CO2, he can discontinue Berkeley’s otherwise feeble efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions.

I’ll continue to ride buses, but I’m wondering if I should make any effort to use better light bulbs or cut down on shower water, given that the cars will continue to contribute as much as 50 percent of our greenhouse emissions.

Steve Geller

•

ANTENNAS ON FRENCH HOTEL

Editors, Daily Planet:

On Thursday night, Sept. 20, there was the Design Review meeting to study this plan. There were five people to oppose these antennas; plus there were 6-10 e-mails.

The chair of the meeting told us that we could only talk about design issues, but not health, etc. You know, sir, health does matter. There were people who wanted to express their concern about the health risks of these antennas. But, the chair shut them up. In the city which is the birth place of Free Speech Movement, people are not allowed to talk. Berkeley has become the graveyard of free speech. What kind of democratic process is this? After all, this country claims that it has surplus of democracy and is trying to export it to other countries. Right from the beginning, things appear to be dishonest. The Public Hearing Notice for the Sept. 20 meeting was not posted on French Hotel. It was posted in the median of Shattuck Avenue. Berkeley police have posted a sign there saying “Keep Off Median, BMC # 14.32.040.” It is against law to be on the median or make people go there. City of Berkeley has broken its own law. Do you remember the city attorney and her office were throwing laws at us in 2002-2004? In particular, you were telling us that because of the law the City Council’s hands were tied up.

By posting the sign in the median of Shattuck Avenue, people were kept uninformed. I mentioned this to the Planning Department. Ms. Anne Burns wrote to me that this was just a mistake. There was Mark Rhoades who was making these little mistakes and now Anne Burns. You know, sir, these innocuous mistakes will become monsters few months down the line. I requested the chair of the Design Review Committee to postpone the meeting for a month or two so that neighbors of French Hotel would be notified. He did not agree.

Perhaps, there are 20-50 people who want to talk about the superficial aesthetic issues. Before, going to a ZAB meeting, the plan should be studied carefully and the public should have chance to make comments.

Are the City of Berkeley and Verizon going to play yet another 15-month charade on the neighbors of French Hotel, and at the end approve these 12 antennas? If this is the case, please let me know. I can save lots time and effort. I would move out of this town.

Shahram Shahruz

•

BUS TRANSIT PROPOSAL

Editors, Daily Planet:

I propose instead of installing hardscape platforms and designated lanes for one AC Transit line, that we instead simply designate one lane of major streets as “Bus, Carpool and Turning Lane Only” during rush hours. Paint diamonds and put up signs like in San Francisco and on the bridge entrance. It encourages actions that reduce traffic and allows the buses to flow efficiently. We could then use the money earmarked for hardscape to increase service or reduce fares.

I also have a suggestion for people fighting Bus Rapid Transit, that they start actually using AC Transit now. Figure out when you can run an errand or get where you are going on the bus. If we can get ridership up we won’t need BRT.

Doug Foster

•

BHA HOUSING LIST

Editors, Daily Planet:

Regarding the BHA Housing List, it is actually not that hard or expensive to tabulate a list. You pick a person from the list, you check their eligibility, and if eligible you’re done. There is absolutely no point in checking people’s eligibility when they go onto the list because if three units a year is a representative turnover, with 500 people waiting you’re going to wait an average of 167 years anyhow. (Or 83 years for a sequential list.) My suspicion is that eligibility will change in the interim.

All this hoo-hah for 61 units of housing? Ridiculous.

John Vinopal

•

BRT DOUBTS

Editors, Daily Planet:

Perhaps I am making a mistake somewhere, but I have tried to evaluate the relative merits of Bus Rapid Transit versus alternatives such as car pools, and I don’t see a clear advantage to BRT. Consider fuel use. I found a study that claims that commute buses can get four to six miles per gallon. If the bus carries 30-40 people, it gets on the order of 180 passenger miles per gallon. This is impressive, but no more impressive than a Toyota Prius with three passengers.

Now consider road carrying capacity. The BRT is supposed to run every five minutes, and will carry maybe 40 people per bus, for a load rate of only eight people per minute. Compare this to a system that is designed to speed all traffic. Assume that timed lights are installed, and left turns are restricted to major intersections where there is room, and/or non-commute hours, so that vehicles can actually move. Assume that traffic moves at 20 mph, and that the space between cars is two car lengths, or approximately 30 feet. This implies about 40 cars per minute. At one person per car, this is 40 people per minute. If car pooling is moderately successful so that the average car carries two people, we get 80 people per minute, or 10 times the carrying capacity of the BRT per lane. The calculation is moderately insensitive to speed if people maintain a space between cars of about one car length distance per every 10 mph (one second).

Many commuters to San Francisco carry passengers because they get a free trip across the bridge. An equivalent incentive for drivers that don’t cross the bridge would be access and perhaps a discount for parking. The city or transit district could set up a system to provide tickets for riders that could be exchanged by drivers for parking. City parking structures that were primarily for car pools would increase the availability of existing parking, and thus please the retail business community. By increasing car pools, it would reduce congestion and greenhouse gas emissions, and thus also please drivers and the rest of us.

One last note. I want it to be clear that I am not against buses. Buses are very useful and convenient for people like me, who, for whatever reason, do not own a car.

Robert Clear

•

‘IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH’

Editors, Daily Planet:

Last night I saw In the Valley of Elah, a heart-wrenching film about a father’s dogged efforts to learn the true circumstances of his soldier son’s death. After days of frustration dealing with bureaucratic government agencies, he discovers the bitter truth. Worse than the gruesome death of his son, not in battle, is the realization that his boy returned from Iraq, a robot, a walking corpse, devoid of human feelings (as with so many soldiers today suffering the traumatic experience of their service in that country).

Then this morning, watching ABC’s program, “This Week,” I waited with dread the all too-familiar roll call of American soldiers killed in Iraq; today it was 19! And here our great leader insists that there be no withdrawal of troops until the summer of 2008. That means 10 months—or 40 weeks x 19. Do your own mathematics—and, for God’s sake, demand the end of this senseless killing of American youth!

Dorothy Snodgrass

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FREEDOM FOR TODAY

Editors, Daily Planet:

I was aroused by a 9 a.m. call Saturday that was a recorded message saying this was the last time to reduce my credit card whatever to 6.9 percent, get protection, who knows. No identification, so I pressed one to speak to a “relationship manager.” When I asked who was calling me, he said “Freedom for Today,” representing 51,000 service something or others.

When I asked him why they didn’t identify themselves, he answered: “You didn’t have to answer the phone.”

I replied: “It’s time for you to move to Iraq.”

He hung up.

No e-mail listing for “Freedom for Today.” The problem, of course, they know who I am, but I don’t know who they are.

Arnie Passman

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THE TIME LADY

Editors, Daily Planet:

AT&T discontinued their “Time Lady” because of their assumption that people will be able to get the time on their cell phones and computers, and because they don’t want to maintain the circuitry. Why retain a service that many without these devices have relied on? What about having to reset time after one of our increasingly frequent power outages? Join me in calling AT&T to complain: 800-791-6661.

Rachel DeCarlo

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DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME SHOULD END NOW

Editors, Daily Planet:

Between the Spring Equinox, March 21, and the Autumn Equinox, Sept. 23, days are longer and nights shorter. It makes sense to shift the “extra” morning daylight to the afternoon with daylight saving time (DST). Now, after the equinox, there is no extra daylight. DST sets our clocks for a later sunrise and darker mornings than standard time. Children have to walk to school as the rising sun glares into the eyes of sleepy commuters. Extending DST to well past September is dangerous. In 2005, the Republican-controlled Congress extended DST until the first Sunday of November. Now we should change back to Standard Time.

You editorials are the first thing I read. I remember how Berkeley sorely missed local coverage before the Berkeley Daily Planet. You and your newspaper make a big difference in the quality of our lives.

Jane Harada

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CALIFORNIA’S ELECTORAL VOTES

Editors, Daily Planet:

The GOP, i.e., the party of religious white folk, is up to its old tricks, stealing elections. They have an initiative in the offing that would give a Republican presidential candidate a good percentage of California’s Electoral College votes. Electoral votes are those pesky things that decide elections, not the popular vote. Remember the snakeoil salesman who slithered into the White House in 2000 and didn’t win the popular vote.

The heist of California’s electoral votes would be perfectly legal if the Republican initiative passes. And how could a sham like this pass? If the GOP confuses the voters enough or an apathetic electorate sits on its butt going duh!

What will happen if the GOP puts another president in the Oval Office, via California’s help, for the next four years? The Republican president would stack the Supreme Court with more religious right-wingers like John Roberts and Samuel Alito. You could kiss Roe vs. Wade goodbye. War would continue full tilt for four more years. This could never happen! No. Have you been paying attention to the crop of GOP presidential pretenders? Anti-abortionists, anti-gay, anti-immigration, pro-war, pro-gun. Go ahead, ignore this dirty-trick initiative and see what it gets you.

Ron Lowe

Grass Valley

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SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE

Editors, Daily Planet:

It is very important for parents to set a good example in order to instill good values in their children. I am pained to see that some parents of young children still find it difficult to stop smoking in front of their children. The parents smoke to relieve the daily fatigue of long work hours. But instead of asking for help with stress from their employers or doctors they unknowingly pass on secondhand smoke to their children.

I have noticed memory lapses and irritability in children who routinely inhale secondhand smoke. I also see children dozing off as early as 8:30 a.m. or 9 a.m. I asked some children if they need extra rest or extra walking to feel better. I was told they went to bed late after watching a movie with their parents. I support children cuddling up with their parents but the thought of a parent smoking at the same time fills me with horror.

I stopped reading the Bay Guardian after the paper endorsed Tom Bates in Berkeley’s 2006 mayoral election. I’d thought the Guardian stood for neighborhood integrity, affordable housing and democratic governance. Also, for in-depth, pre-endorsement research of political candidates. But its editors embraced Bates—the big developers’ back-room buddy—without bothering to send me so much as an e-mail about my own candidacy. That experience made me wonder how much I should trust the Guardian, especially when it ventures outside San Francisco.

Last week, however, a friend told me to check out the current Guardian’s cover story, “San Francisco’s Housing Psychosis.” Having done just that, I now urge Planet readers to run out and pick up a copy of the Sept. 19-25 Guardian before it disappears from the newsstands on Wednesday. What you’ll find is a cold-water-in-your-face account of how speculative, high-end housing development is ravaging San Francisco’s economy, society, culture and its environment. Scaled down to Berkeley dimensions, the story could be about the irrational exuberance that’s deforming our own fair city.

From the Guardian’s lead editorial: “As many as 23 new complexes of 250 units or more, soaring from five or six stories to more than 1,000 feet, are on the drawing board, working their way through the city planning system, and more are almost certainly on the way.” In contrast to San Francisco’s high-rise building boom of the ’80s, these projects are for housing—to be precise, expensive condominiums. But that’s not the only difference: In the ’80s, environmentalists fought overdevelopment in the city. By contrast, the editorial observes, today’s environmentalists vigorously advocate the condo craze. Preaching the virtues of “densification” and transit-oriented-development, new urbanists and smart growthers ignore the fact that “[i]n many cases these new condos are creating more car trips: People who work out of town are buying them—and people who work in San Francisco are so badly priced out of the market that they’re moving farther and father away.” Nor are fans of sky-high density talking about how to fund the infrastructure and amenities—parks and open spaces, schools, new bus lines, police stations—that are necessary to maintain the city’s quality life and public safety in the face of explosive development.

The Guardian does more than sound the alarm; it proposes a three-part remedy. First: Preserve existing rental housing. Second: Find a new way to fund affordable housing construction. Third (from “green policy wonk” Marc Salomon): Put a measure on the city ballot that establishes an equitable, comprehensive housing policy by capping new market-rate housing—in other words, housing for the rich—and requiring developers who want to build such projects to compete with each other in offering substantial community benefits such as affordable set-asides, green buildings, neighborhood-friendly design, money for parks and schools. In 1986 San Franciscans passed a similar measure, Measure M, limiting commercial office development and mandating the preservation of neighborhood character for all new projects.

These are all commendable ideas, regrettably as appropriate for today’s Berkeley as for San Francisco. But they need to be accompanied by a large caveat: Laws are only as good as the officials who administer them. The Sept. 19-25 Guardian also includes an op-ed by neighborhood activist Dan Hoyle recounting how he and his neighbors recently waited until 11:45 p.m. to get their three minutes apiece to ask the San Francisco Planning Commission to respect Prop. M and deny “giant, five-story luxury condo blocks” that would remake Valencia and “our beloved Mission” District into something unrecognizable. By that time, Hoyle writes, “two commissioners were literally asleep. The gavel swung. Approved. It was like the people of San Francisco never showed up. Like Prop. M never passed. Like the Mission didn’t exist as a real neighborhood.” Sounds like a night at Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustments Board.

Ultimately the only way to make our cities equitable and livable is to elect officials who respect official policy, law and—most important—constituents other than big developers, and who demand that their appointees do the same. To that end, alerting and engaging a largely distracted electorate—and redirecting environmentalist energies—should be the top priority on both sides of the bay.

If you missed the hard copy, you can read the Bay Guardian online at www.sfbg.com.

Friends! The hour of judgment is at hand for our planet. Doom is knocking on our door in the form of catastrophic climate change. Global warming not only threatens our so-called way of life, it threatens the very existence of the planet itself! Here in Berkeley, we must do more than our fair share to offset this crisis. Why more than our fair share? Quite simply because other communities cannot be relied on to do even their meager fair share in cutting back on carbon emissions. We must make up for what others fail to do on a global scale through our own heroic self-sacrifice. We cannot afford to wait until 2050 to meet our modest carbon emission reduction goals. Many of us who passed this measure will not even be alive then to implement it. By 2050 it will have been too late for this planet I fear, possibly far too late for all of the extinct species whose blood will be on our hands. This is no time for buying absolution through carbon credits or for half-assed symbolic measures which mostly have a feel good significance.

No, the time for bolder self-sacrifice has arrived. The only real, long term hope for the eco-sphere is a massive human population collapse, hopefully leading to the voluntary extinction of the human race. Already, a new urgency and groundswell of support is building for the idea that humans are a type of super toxin which the planet cannot sustain or support in the longterm. Cogent support for the voluntary extinction of the human race is well-articulated in all its ramifications and implications here : www.vhemt.org.

The city and residents of Berkeley should be on the leading vanguard of the voluntary extinction of the human race. First of all, if China can implement a very sensible one child policy in urban centers, Berkeley voters should approve an advisory No Child policy for residents of our city. It could be our answer to the Bush regime’s No Child Left Behind Act! Next, on the state level we need to rally support for a ballot initiative which allows us to die with dignity when we choose to. When this option is legally enacted, Berkeley should be the first city in California to open a euthanasia clinic. Hopefully, if we are true to our principles, our city’s residents will be lined up for many blocks waiting for their turn to be recycled into the earth!

Even before that time, younger readers of the Planet in particular should refrain from having children. Every person less makes a huge difference; a far bigger difference than using rapid transit, riding your bike or recycling bottles once you are born. Readers of the Planet who are already parents and grandparents should actively discourage further destructive procreation by their relatives. If pets need to be neutered and spayed by law, so should humans for many of the same reasons!

Imagine if Berkeley has the honor of becoming the first human ghost town on earth to revert to a primal state of nature! The oaks old and new will flourish along the streams in which trout and salmon teem! Mountain lions will boldly roam the plains and not confine themselves to Wildcat Road in Tilden Park any longer. Perhaps bears from other regions of the state will finally return to what we call “Grizzly Peak Blvd.” The grasslands will return to the slopes of the hills after forest fires clear them off and the air will blow pure and sweet over the bubbling creeks just as it once did when the ancestors of Running Wolf roamed the Bayshore in peace and harmony with all nature.

The recent spinal cord injury to Kevin Everett, a special teams player for the Buffalo Bills of the National Football League, highlights the frustrations felt by thousands of families across the United States. Everett’s prognosis continues to improve due to extraordinary emergency care delivered immediately after his accident. And, though he does not know it yet, his fan base grew considerably at the moment he was stilled upon colliding with his opponent. Large portions of the spinal injured community now follow his recovery. Their discontent stems from the reminders of neglect shown to the legacy of another high profile injured individual.

The Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Act will be five years old on Sept. 25. Unfortunately, no one is celebrating because it is five years still in the making and not five years providing vital programs enhancing treatments and cures. I know. My family lives the life. When my son broke his neck in 2002, the CDRPA was a buoy to which we attached ourselves in the roiled sea of a spinal injury. We reasoned that only a commitment on a national scale could make a difference in his lifetime.

The bill enjoyed near unanimous support in both Houses, with numerous co-sponsors from each side of the aisle. Yet it languished in the 108th and 109th Republican controlled Congresses.

First introduced on Reeve’s 50th birthday in 2002, the CDRPA provides for collaboration in paralysis research, rehabilitation, and quality of life programs through the National Institutes of Health. This trio of fundamentals unites the disparate elements of care and cure for spinal cord injury in particular, and paralysis in general.

Reeve’s injury in 1995 and the final nine years of his life encapsulate an era of unprecedented hope for those with spinal injuries. In his search for remedies Reeve was at first revered and later ridiculed. Critics accused him of exploiting his fame to promote pie-in-the-sky therapies. The religious right castigated him for aggressively touting the unproven potential of stem cells.

Unbowed, Reeve pursued a multi-layered advocacy for solutions to his plight and that of all living with paralysis. Ultimately, he mobilized a political caucus resulting in the drafting of the CDRPA.

The bill made no mention of nor had any intention of changing the President’s policy on stem cells. Nonetheless, right-wing interest groups exerted their bias. Reeve dared to sail on the periphery of their prejudices and his legislation paid the price. Twice, in 2004 and 2006, Senators placed anonymous holds within committee, scuttling certain passage of the CDRPA.

As injuries go, Reeve’s was as bad as they come. Nonetheless, with dedication to a physical regimen recommended by innovative doctors, the late actor exhibited neurological return. Even if this return was modest to most lay people, it was a revelation to researchers: here was evidence that a spinal cord could recover and perhaps even regenerate after trauma.

Suddenly, an entire industry of intensive rehabilitation arose as exercise physiologists and physical therapists developed novel methods of treating paralysis. Methods, I might add, that will benefit Kevin Everett in his recovery.

For scientists, the implication was clear; patients with damaged spinal cords could improve. And, as this plasticity presented itself convincingly in anecdotal settings, clinicians imagined possibilities if the rigor of trials were combined with the restorative therapies of regenerative medicine. Thus, the four-letter word, cure, crept into the lexicon of neuroscience.

Reeve’s untimely death in 2004 dampened the enthusiasm. Hope diminished further, 1 1/2 years later, with the passing of his wife Dana. Today, the remnants of momentum for therapies stagger more sideways than forward. The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation continues to be a guiding light. Its effectiveness, however, dims due to myopic funding priorities and the lack of a charismatic leader.

Certainly, Reeve changed the debate about recovery from spinal cord injury. His savvy gave a voice to disabled America. But the volume of that unifying voice softens with each fleeting year. The paralyzed sub-culture of our society, which includes my family, seethes when reminded of the opportunities delayed by regressive reactions to the Reeve bill.

If enacted, this legislation will not reverse paralysis. But it may well be the bridge between hope and future deliverance. The CDRPA initiates a structured funding platform and coordinates a clinical trial network to test the theories of researchers investigating the riddles of paralysis.

The passage of the CDRPA would also signal our country is ready to confront the moral absolutism stifling much of the legislative process. By denying solutions to all with the remotest of associations to their prejudices, the religious right, in this instance, withheld hope from those living with crippling maladies.

On the anniversary of the birth of this bill, no one should question whether its namesake was a conservative or a liberal. The relevant question is whether humane healthcare policy can advance without pandering to the ideology of faith-based opinion. If so, that would be something worth celebrating and I believe Kevin Everett and his family will be cheering.

John Smith is the father of a Jack Kent Cooke Scholar and first-year student at Berkeley’s Boalt School of Law. He volunteers for Care Cure Community, the world’s largest website devoted to spinal cord injury, which is hosted by Rutgers University, where Smith moderates forums on cure, funding, legislation and advocacy.

It was with some sadness that I read the recent contributions of Jeff Ogar and Matthew Shoemaker in the letters to the editor section of the Daily Planet. They both provided true-life examples that serve to underscore the concerns I expressed in my Sept. 14 commentary, “Anger and Football Hysteria.” Each man seems to be convinced of two things: First, that I am a bad person, not just someone with views different from their own; and second, that I simply could not love trees and also support the Cal Bears football team.

Mr. Ogar peppers his Sept. 18 letter with the kind of disrespectful language that confuses issues, rather than illuminates them. And he seems to be so consumed by his own anger that he scarcely has time to pay attention to the facts—which conveniently allows him to misrepresent my views in both big and small ways. I don’t value the lives of trees over people; however, I do think it’s important—particularly in this age of global warming—to understand and value the contributions that all living things make to our shared environment. The members of the Berkeley City Council agree with me on this point. In unanimously voting to oppose the plans of the University of California to cut down the trees in the Memorial Stadium oak grove, they declared: “This urban woodland is an irreplaceable resource that contributes to the well-being of all Berkeley citizens.”

Also, contrary to Mr. Ogar’s assertion, I believe I care far more about the safety of Cal athletes and coaches who use Memorial Stadium daily than do some members of the university administration and athletic department. Why do I say this? They have known for at least the past 15 years that the Hayward Fault is capable of producing a major earthquake, and likely will rupture dramatically sometime soon. Memorial Stadium is literally bisected by the Hayward fault—yet they allow hundreds of students and staff to occupy rooms under the stadium every day! I believe that we should get these people out of the stadium and move them to safe, temporary facilities now, rather than waiting two or three years from now to protect them. They should be moved out of those dangerous facilities within the next 30 days, and I challenge Chancellor Birgineau to explain why he fails to address this important safety issue.

Regarding my suggestion that “Chancellor Robert Birgineau, Athletic Director Sandy Barbour, and Coach Jeff Tedford address their fans publicly to encourage more civil behavior toward the guests that come to our campus,” Mr. Shoemaker seems to have overlooked the key word “publicly.” Of course I’m aware that there are videos produced regularly on these issues, but the viewership of them is restricted by inclination and convenience. That’s why I recommend public statements. I think they should be made at the beginning of every home football game.

I hope Mr. Ogar is sitting in a safer chair now—and so won’t fall out of it when he reads the next sentence. I repeat: I am a Cal Bears fan. Not only that, I remained a loyal fan through the lean years, when Cal consistently found ways to lose important games—often in the most disheartening fashion. Unlike now, those were the years when a post-season bowl game was a pipe dream right from opening day. Many of us true blue Cal fans stuck it out through those dismal years, when the emotional highs were few and far between, only because of our strong connection to Cal. And if Jeff Ogar is an actual fan, and I assume he is, he will understand exactly what I’m talking about.

Furthermore, I believe it was very unfair for Mr. Ogar to imply that I treat some Cal alumni disrespectfully. I do not. In fact, as most everybody knows who is involved in the oak grove issue, I strive to listen carefully and respond thoughtfully to anyone who wishes to discuss the issues. And if Mr. Ogar wishes to explore the matter further, I would be happy to talk with him at any time.

I question the assumption, held by Mr. Ogar and others, that it is an either-or decision when it comes to building the new student gym/office complex or preserving the Memorial Stadium oak grove. I have spoken with hundreds of people about this issue, including experts in geology and engineering, and there is a growing consensus that this project can and should be built at an alternate site—both to preserve a valuable natural area and to better protect the safety of Cal students and staff. There is a win-win solution to this problem that is right in front of us. All we need is the will to sit down together and work cooperatively to reach a solution that the whole community can embrace.

And finally, Mr. Shoemaker’s brief, two-sentence letter (Sept. 18) illustrates a dangerous logical thinking fallacy: “Black or White” thinking. This attitude—of dividing people and ideas into rigid and oppositional categories with no middle ground—allows one to dehumanize opponents and fosters disrespect and even worse treatment of them. Just for the record, I certainly do not think that Cal football fans are “evil”; after all, I’m one of them.

What’s more, I have met and spoken with many Cal athletes over the past year, and I have been consistently impressed by their intelligence, insight, and how well they articulated their opinions about a variety of issues in the Cal community. Not only that, their level of commitment and passion for their teams was truly inspiring. These young men and women are shining examples of the best that UC Berkeley has to offer, and I look forward to meeting many more of them.

Doug Buckwald is a Cal graduate (1982) and a Cal Bears fan.

Columns

Loose nukes sink…” well, just about anything. The official story is that on Aug. 30, the U.S. Air Force (AF) “mistakenly” loaded six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles on a B-52 at Minot, North Dakota and flew them to Barksdale, Louisiana for decommissioning. The mistake was discovered and the munitions officer at Minot was suspended pending an investigation.

Except the story doesn’t make any sense and it certainly didn’t happen the way the AF says it did. At least according to the hundreds of current and retired military personal and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) with nuclear experience who are writing letters to the Army Times and military websites essentially charging that the AF is lying.

“Ain’t no way in hell that anybody in the U.S. military could do anything ‘inadvertently’ with a nuke,” writes a retired NCO who worked with nuclear weapons.

Another veteran with lots of hands-on experience says, “the safeguards involved in nuclear munitions in all the armed forces are incredibly complex,” and when nuclear weapons are involved, “all kinds of red lights go off in everyone’s systems.” The military is so up-tight about nuclear weapons procedures, the writer says, that in one incident an NCO who violated a “no go” area was fatally bayoneted by a guard.

There are any numbers of things that don’t make sense about the “official” version. For one thing, when nuclear weapons are moved by air, it is in a special C-130s designed to prevent radiation leakage in case of a crash. But in the Aug. 6 event, the missiles were attached to the wings of the B-52, which as one wag commented was like “shipping ammunition in a gun.”

Secondly, if the nukes were going to be decommissioned, they would have been sent to Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. From there the warheads would have been transferred to the Pantex facility in Amarillo, Texas for dismantling. Barksdale, in contrast, is one the main staging bases for the Middle East.

Some commentators argue that the only way the operation could have avoided the “red lights” was by leap frogging the normal chain of command. Only the National Security Agency or Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office has that kind of juice. In May 2001, Cheney was placed in charge of “all federal programs dealing with weapons of mass destruction.”

One theory is that Cheney was trying to ship nukes to the Middle East in preparation for a strike on Iran. But transporting nukes to the Middle East would be like sending coals to Newcastle: U.S. forces in the theater are bristling with nuclear weapons.

A former officer writes that it might even have been a “cost-cutting” maneuver—albeit a dumb one—to save money by putting the nukes on a regular flight rather than using the expensive, specially designed C-130.

Some have even suggested that it was a plot by Christian evangelicals trying to bring on the apocalypse. As silly as that might sound, a 2006 study for the U.S. War College by Col. William Millonig concluded that “conservative Christian and Republican values have affected the military’s decision making and policy recommendations,” and warned that “America’s strategic thinkers, both military and civilian, must be aware of this and its potential implications on policy formulation.”

So the explanations for the errant nukes range from “Grand Conspiracy,” penny pinching, to new Testament crazies. Major incompetence is a strong candidate as well.

And who blew the whistle? One military source says that if the Army Times ran the story, it was because someone very high up the command chain told them to do it. According to the source, the only way the story could have come out is if “the dime dropper wore at least three stars, if not four.”

What gets lost in all this is that the Advanced Cruise Missile packs a W-80 warhead with an explosive power of from five to 150 kilotons. The atomic bomb that flattened Hiroshima and killed 220,000 people—100,000 of them in a millisecond—was 13 kilotons. Schelpping these things around by “mistake” is something that Congress, not the Air Force, needs to investigate. Identifying who authorized the operation would go a long way toward finding out how six nuclear weapons went AWOL.

Maybe the media should drop OJ and start asking some questions?

Loose warplanes…” well, it is not clear exactly what those Israeli jets that violated Syrian airspace Sept. 6 were up to, except that they weren’t there for the reasons the U.S. State Department is claiming.

The aircraft, according to Syrian Foreign Minister, Walid Muallem, dropped “bombs” in Syria’s arid northern plains and “fuel tanks” in Turkey. The Turks called the incident “unacceptable.”

The Israelis are mum.

On Sept. 11, unnamed “officials” in the Bush administration told the New York Times that the Israelis bombed a “weapons cache” that Syria was sending to Hezbollah in Lebanon. But that story had no legs. The bombing—if there was one—took place on the Turkish-Syrian boundary, a long way from Lebanon’s northern border. On top of which, Hezbollah is in south Lebanon.

Three days later, Andrew Semmel, the acting deputy secretary of state for nuclear nonproliferation policy, trotted out another explanation: Israel bombed a covert nuclear program set up by the North Koreans.

According to Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and a senior fellow at the New American Foundation, neoconservatives in the Bush Administration are trying to sabotage talks with North Korea and any detente with Syria. “They [neocons] want to torpedo the North Korea deal” and “make sure there is no cooperation in Syria.”

And right on cue, former UN Ambassador and neocon stalwart John Bolton was writing in the Wall Street Journal that “Iran, Syria, and others might be ‘safe havens’ for North Korea’s nuclear-weapons development, or may already have benefited from it.” He then told the New York Times that continued talks with North Korea over ending its nuclear weapons program “would be a big mistake.”

Chiming in was U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who wrote in the New York Sun, “Damascus has been developing its nuclear facilities,” and warning, “Syria poses a growing threat that the U.S. must confront.”

But when the international Atomic Energy Agency investigated Syria in 2004, it found no evidence of a nuclear program.

Joseph Cirincione, director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, says “The story nonsense.” He says the 40-year old Syrian nuclear program “is too basic to support any weapons capability. Universities have larger programs than Syria.”

Another possibility is that the Israelis are preparing to whack Iran. Northern Syria is one of Israel’s corridors into Iran (the other is through Jordan and Saudi Arabia). According to Time, the Israeli incursion was designed to test Syria’s Russian made Pantsyr air defense system, a mixture of missiles and 30 mm cannons that is supposedly immune to jamming. According to Time, Iran is also deploying the Pantsyr around its nuclear facilities.

The corridor explanation makes some sense, probing the Pantsyr does not. The latter is a short-range tactical system and any bombing of Iranian targets will be from high altitude using satellite-guided munitions. Even Syria’s new SA-24 missile system can only reach 22,000 feet, not high enough to seriously bother U.S. or Israeli planes.

So, what were those warplanes up to? Mapping radar sites? Spoiling for a fight? Humiliating the Syrians?

Dark armies are moving by night, with potential catastrophe at every turn.

Our friends at the Oakland Tribune published an editorial this week with the opinion that “Oakland Not Ready For Control Over Schools” and urging, therefore, that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger veto Assemblymember Sandré Swanson’s AB45 bill that might speed up a return to local school control.

The Tribune—as everyone else—is, of course, entitled to its opinion on this and any subject they choose to discuss, but as the explanation in the unsigned opinion piece of rationale for this particular opinion is based upon “facts” that are so fundamentally, fatally, and flat-out dead wrong, it calls into question whether the people who wrote the editorial are even reading, and analyzing, the information being presented on their own news pages.

Oh, glory, this is going to take some sorting out, so bear with me, brethren.

“Back in 2003,” The Tribune editorial begins, “the picture at the Oakland Unified School District was downright scary. ‘Ghost’ employees were collecting fake substitute teacher paychecks. School district officials were hiding tens of millions of dollars in deficits by cooking the books.

Eventually, the gross fiscal mismanagement came to light. With Oakland Unified on the verge of bankruptcy … the state had no choice but to loan the ailing district $100 million … and Oakland Schools were put under state receivership.”

Whether or not it is true that the areas of items listed in the Tribune editorial amounted to “gross fiscal mismanagement” is beside the point—that’s a matter of opinion and this, as we said, is an opinion piece. The point is, however, these were not the elements that precipitated the OUSD fiscal crisis of spring, 2003 and the resultant state takeover. The sequence of events that did precipitate the takeover—generally accepted in most quarters except the Tribune editorial room—was 1) OUSD’s student enrollment took a sudden, unpredicted downturn, causing an enormous drop in ADA-based state monies coming into the district; 2) OUSD staff discovered—after it re-ran the numbers on a newly-purchased computer system—that a recently-passed and implemented teacher pay raise, which had seemed to be fiscally sound to all local, county, and state monitoring agencies, was actually going to cost the a significantly larger amount than was projected in the budget; 3) these two fiscal hits meant that OUSD would not have enough cash on hand to meet the final district payroll for the 2002-03 school year; and 4) despite the fact that OUSD’s independent bond attorneys signed off on the district’s internal bailout plan, Alameda County School Superintendent Sheila Jordan and then-California Attorney General Bill Lockyer sabotaged and killed the proposal by the district to loan itself money from construction bonds to meet the payroll, thus forcing the district to ask the state for a fiscal bailout, thus precipitating the state takeover.

Who should be blamed for this series of events—and whether it amounted to accident, mismanagement, or plot to take over the district—has been a matter of debate and discussion since the state takeover. But failure to even list these events as the precipitate cause of the state takeover is the first fatal flaw of the Tribune editorial.

Unfortunately, there are more.

The editorial goes into its main point, that Mr. Schwarzenegger should veto Mr. Swanson’s OUSD local control bill because OUSD officials “have yet to demonstrate that they are capable of handling their finances in a responsible manner.” To back that point, the editorial produces a single line of “proof”: “In fact,” the Tribune editors inform us, “the County Office Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team—a task force that conducts regular audits on the district’s performance—has consistently given Oakland Unified poor marks when it comes to its handling of money.”

This is just plain, poor writing, and we don’t mean the nitpicking point that there is no “county” FCMAT office; it’s a state-financed, statewide agency. The flaw in this particular formation is that FCMAT began monitoring OUSD’s finances before the state takeover—FCMAT has the dubious distinction, in fact, of having both approved fiscal soundness of the original OUSD pay raise that helped bring down the district’s budget as well as recommended the purchase of the new computer system that allowed the district to discover the fiscal problems with the pay raise. But since the point of including the poor FCMAT marks in the Tribune editorial would seem to be to show that OUSD officials are still unable to manage district finances—and thus unable to take over full management of the district—we have to assume that the editorial’s reference to poor marks on handling district money refer to recent FCMAT reports; that is, reports taken in the past few years, since the state takeover.

Clever local readers of the Tribune editorial have already seen the problems with that assertion, however. Since local OUSD officials—the elected board—have had no hand whatsoever in the running of OUSD finances since the state takeover, the poor FCMAT marks on recent OUSD financial management only show that the state superintendent’s office has not shown it is capable of handling OUSD’s finances. So how can the FCMAT scores prove—or disprove—whether or not local Oakland officials are “ready” to retake control of the district? They cannot. But, of course, that has always been the Lewis Carroll-type lunacy present in the original 2003 state takeover legislation, so the Tribune editors perhaps, can be excused for getting this confused.

Now, the Tribune gets into the heart of its particular problem with Mr. Swanson’s AB45, and why they think Mr. Schwarzenegger should apply his veto pen.

AB45, the editorial explains “aims for a gradual return to local control. It would require State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell to return various aspects of school administration to the district in piecemeal fashion. If schools were to meet certain improvement targets, O’Connell would be bound by law to gradually return local control. The problem with AB 45, is that it would leave control of the district’s purse strings in state hands. In our view, it makes no sense to separate the finances from the rest of school administration. How can a local board be in control of community relations, curriculum, personnel, facilities or pupil development, when the state still has the final word over spending?”

How, indeed?

The problem with the Tribune’s position on AB45 is that the difficulties in the piecemeal local control return revealed in their editorial paragraph quoted above did not originate in Mr. Swanson’s AB45, but are actually the creature of the original SB39 legislation by State Senator Don Perata that authorized the state takeover of OUSD. That legislation, and the underlying state law to which it is attached, goes into great detail on what circumstances must be in place for a local district to be taken over by the state, but gets decidedly frizzy and fuzzy when it comes to how the locals are to regain control and authority over their local school system. Mr. Swanson’s bill only seeks to bring some clarity and certainty and semblance of standards to the return-to-local-control process.

In fact, the return to local control in OUSD on the piecemeal basis complained about in the Tribune editorial has already begun, not under AB45, which is not yet law, but under the original SB39 takeover legislation. Under that law, State Superintendent Jack O’Connell earlier this year handed over local control to the OUSD in the area of community relations and governance, leaving the remaining four operational areas listed in SB39, including finances, in state hands.

As a side note, the piecemeal and seemingly arbitrary division of the local district into portions that cannot reasonably be divided—finances, facilities, personnel management, pupil achievement, and local governance—appear so arbitrary because they actually have nothing to do with determining how “ready” a school district is for restoration of local authority, but are the convenient suckholes originally determined by state legislators and FCMAT in determining where FCMAT could set down its tentacles into a local school district in order to draw out as much consultant contract money from those districts as possible. In most cases, FCMAT’s monitoring teams are called into a local school district—Berkeley Unified School District and Oakland Unified School District, to cite the recent local examples—because the local district exhibited fiscal problems. Once there, however, by virtue of the state law that allows its intervention, FCMAT brings in separate monitoring teams to evaluate the local district in each of the five areas listed above—fiscal management, facilities, personnel management, pupil achievement, and local governance—for which the local districts are required, again by state law, to foot the bill.

But back to our main point.

The Tribune editorial concludes that “there is no reason to [return local control to OUSD] hastily. Another year would give local officials a better chance to prove they’re ready to take on such responsibility.”

Actually, there is a very good reason why local control should be returned to OUSD soon, although one would have difficulty describing such an event after five years of state control as “hasty.” The reason local control should be returned to OUSD soon, however, is that it is the state superintendent’s office which has proven itself incapable of running a local school district, particularly in the area of fiscal management. In the five years of state control, the two state-appointed administrators—the departed Mr. Ward and Ms. Statham—never submitted a balanced budget. And we have only recently learned from reports by OUSD’s state-run finance department that while projecting a $4.7 million deficit for the coming fiscal year, the district is both overrun with unspent cash and closing down critical and necessary educational programs because of an alleged lack of revenue. Mr. O’Connell has now compounded the problem by hiring—this time on an interim basis—the third administrator in a row who lacks the expertise in fiscal management that is specifically called for in the SB39 takeover legislation.

As OUSD Board President David Kakishiba remarked to me in an interview, a little wryly, if any district under local control had committed such fiscally irresponsible actions, they would be quickly taken over by the state. To their sorrow, as we in Oakland have learned, and to which we will gladly give testimony to any responsible party who will listen.

Respectfully, therefore, we disagree with our friends at the Tribune. Mr. Schwarzenegger should sign AB45, and quickly.

Would a neighborhood by any other name still sell as sweet? An entertaining aspect of reading real estate listings in Berkeley has to do with the identification of neighborhoods.

Realtors have a fine-tuned sense of what will attract the interest of prospective buyers. Revering “location, location, location” they attach favored neighborhood names to their listings, often stretching geographical and historical credibility in the process.

Here’s an example. I live in Berkeley’s Le Conte neighborhood. It’s roughly west of Telegraph, south of Dwight, east of Shattuck. No one who lives here, so far as I know, calls it the “Elmwood.” That’s a separate and distinct district centered at Ashby and College blocks to the east. Everyone knows that.

Everyone but realtors and some buyers, that is. For years I’ve picked up house-for-sale flyers to find I live in the “Greater Elmwood,” “Outer Elmwood,” or “Lower Elmwood.” This designation sometimes seemed to extend to homes within honking distance of south Shattuck.

More recently, however, the Le Conte district has acquired its own East Berkeley cachet. We’re sometimes described now as the “Berkeley Bowl Neighborhood.”

But who knows what confusion will ensue when Berkeley Bowl opens their second branch miles west, off Seventh Street, and realtors down there want a piece of the name identification? Will that become “West Berkeley Bowl Neighborhood"? Perhaps “WeBo” for short?

Still, “Elmwood” lingers in places it really hasn’t put down roots. New condominiums on the west side of Telegraph, at the edge of Le Conte, and just a few blocks south of Dwight, were recently marketed as “in the tree-lined Elmwood District.”

Rockridge is the Oakland version of Berkeley’s Elmwood, a district of immensely expandable, and often imaginary, proportions sprawling, in the peculiar geography of realtors, for scores of blocks in all directions. I’ve been told over the years that many Oaklanders have been amused to find that they were living in “The Rockridge” when they actually resided a zip code or two away.

But recently, as gentrification creeps, other North Oakland neighborhoods are reasserting their identity apart from Rockridge. “Temescal” has come into its own and carved out its old zone around the nexus of Telegraph, Claremont, and 51st Street.

Nearby along Telegraph just north of Highway 24 there’s “Idora Park,” the name of a 19th-century beer garden and amusement resort, later subdivided for homes. And a bit further north Berkeley’s “Halcyon Neighborhood” has self-identified in recent years around a new pocket park.

I love the possibility that these names may come to everyday usage, just as the long-lost, pre-annexation name of “Lorin” is increasingly used for the area around the Ashby BART Station. “Lorin District” gives renewed and much needed distinction to a great part of town that, for generations, was regarded as just part of “South Berkeley,” as was “Le Conte” for that matter.

South Berkeley, as you may know, is another name for Where Redevelopment Schemes Go to Revive. Sort of like “North Oakland,” at least the tiny part that’s not “Rockridge.”

Sometimes a great name can undesirably change a neighborhood. Journalist Hunter Thompson once proposed to roll back gentrification in the Rockies by officially changing the name of Aspen, Colorado. The ski and jet set would abandon the town, he argued, if forced to list “Fat City” as an address.

Berkeley neighborhoods are not necessarily exactly defined although some are demarcated with stone entrance pillars, tinted sidewalks, and the like. There are areas where names naturally collide and a certain fluidity of identity is appropriate. Both the Willard neighborhood and the Bateman (around Alta Bates Hospital) district overlap what’s also called Elmwood.

And neighborhood names often evolve. When I moved to Berkeley, many old-timers still called the Telegraph business district and surroundings “Telly.” You rarely hear that now.

That neighborhood then went through a period as the “South Campus” which didn’t sit well with those fretful about university expansion. For the past two decades or so “Southside” seems to have become respectable, although spinning off a few illegitimate offspring along the way.

For example, a condo development on Telegraph several blocks south of Ashby and properly near the edge of the Bateman neighborhood was named “Southside Lofts” a few years back, a geographical misplacement of nearly a mile.

Some neighborhoods never seem to have prominent names. Consider that part of Berkeley north of University Avenue and east of Sacramento Street. It doesn’t seem to have a clear name, as far as I know, although in Realtorese any home there would probably be described as “a few minutes walk from the Gourmet Ghetto.”

Perhaps it will soon be the “Trader Joe’s” neighborhood; move over, Berkeley Bowl.

That same area falls into the “Central Berkeley” classification, an uncomfortable appellation since developers, city staff and councilmembers often translate it to “Central City: Build Big Here.”

Nearby, long-time residents may have found an antidote to upward expansionism by calling their Central Berkeley district, west of old City Hall, “McGee’s Farm” after the homesteader who once owned it. That’s a nomenclatural cow’s kick in the solar plexus to urban density advocates. Build condos in our farm fields, heh?

On the other hand, maybe the McGee Farmers have doomed themselves, since real estate development traditionally destroys the very things it ostensibly honors. Think of all the “Shady Acres” and the like that designate forests of condo towers or fields of sun-struck tract homes.

Evocative names like “Elmwood” and “Rockridge” presumably add panache and attract potential buyers, although their origins may be humble. For example, that’s Rockridge as in the ridge of rock that early Oaklanders revered so much they took away quite a lot of it in quarry operations. And isn’t adjacent “Temescal” something like “Sweat Lodge” in the Olde Tongue?

At least homely East Bay names are still a notch up from San Francisco’s “Cow Hollow” or “Dog Patch.” And we have few, if any, of those colorful East Coast names like “Hell’s Kitchen.” We have to make do with “Gourmet Ghetto” instead, or perhaps “Nut Hill.”

An old Oakland native once told me that the now very chic cleft valley along Highway 13 south of Lake Temescal was colloquially called “Pneumonia Gulch” because the sun entered late and left early, and the fog and chill lingered.

I’m not sure anyone ever used that officially, though. “Pneumonia Gulch Liquors,” for instance, would be a bad business naming decision, although those shopping there would have the assurance that if something went wrong, the ambulance trip wouldn’t be too far to what has long been known as Oakland’s “Pill Hill” neighborhood with its phalanx of hospitals and pharmacists.

Some may remember that after the 1991 hill fire there was a short-lived movement for parts of the Oakland Hills to separate from the city and become a new town named “Tuscany", evoking visions of sun-drenched grapevines rather than rows of charred telephone poles.

And “Oakland Hills"—there’s a term. Where exactly do the “Oakland Hills” end and the “Berkeley Hills” begin? Similarly, can anyone name an undeniably precise line where “Hills” change to “Flatlands”?

It’s all enough to make you want to give up and go home to your own neighborhood. Whatever the realtors are calling it now.

One of the limitations, frustrations, confusions, and overall learning experiences any gardener encounters here is water. Understand that I use “learning experience” as an expletive.

Container gardens are infamous for testing a plant’s tolerances and a planter’s luck and skill with regard to water. Houseplants are chronically overwatered except when they’re underwatered. An overwatered plant can look a lot like a thirsty plant when it’s in the process of succumbing to some wet rot or other. Man, you can’t win.

Outdoor planting here is equally water-weird. A Mediterranean climate like ours has a few salient characteristics, and a prominent one is that it doesn’t rain all summer. This is quite a challenge for a plant trying to make a living: drought during the season when the days are longest and the light to grow by is most abundant.

Look at plants native here, and to other such places like South Africa, coastal Australia and Chile, and of course the coast of the Mediterranean. Lots of them, counting numbers of species as well as populations, are annuals. They start growing as soon as the soil warms and the sun-time increases in spring, flower and reproduce and scatter their tough seeds by midsummer, and die when water gets too scarce.

Perennials including trees get seriously stingy about water. They grow silver or succulent or tough-hided foliage, imbue it with (often fragrant) oils to help retain moisture; they drop their leaves and retreat into wood, like buckeye, or underground storage, like most of our gorgeous bulbs, by summer’s end. If they’re holdouts from a wetter era like redwoods, they learn to sieve water from the ocean fogs and drink that all summer, sustaining their understory neighbors too.

One way to improve your luck is by knowing what your plant is and what its needs and tolerances are. “Tolerance” in plantspeak is some condition—low light, wet or alkaline or heavy soil, wind—a plant doesn’t like but will survive. If you have the plant already, you’ll want to give it what makes it thrive if you can, or at least opt for something it will tolerate. If you have the place and are looking for a plant to put in it, look for one that will like what you have to give.

It’s getting close to planting time for natives (and other Mediterraneans). If you have decent drainage, which for most of us means some slope or berms or lumps in the yard, you can plant natives like Fremontodendron or those bulbs, Calochortus, Brodiaea and the like, that are not only drought-tolerant but drought-demanding. If they get irrigated in summer, they’re susceptible to fungus rots that multiply in warm, moist soils.

There’s the rub: Most garden plants, native or no, need help at least through their first summer. That’s a bit of suspense we just have to endure: is this infant dying of too little water or too much? If you’ve put plants with similar needs together, it’ll be easier to cope with this, to guess whether they’re all thirsty or not.

How? More next week.

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in East Bay Home & Real Estate. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet.

I know you’re out there: you who fear tools. Confirmed abdicators of all things mechanical. Live prey to all members of the Phylum Contractazoa. You who hide in corners until the power is brought back on again by mysterious means. I am here to help but there IS a price. Immersion therapy is not easy but it is simple and you can only change if you really want to change.

The best way to start down the road is to pick one small job and I have just the one. It’s not that complex. You can’t burn down the house and you can’t get shocked. It’s also something that has a good cost savings and a high show-off factor. If all goes moderately well, well have you up and done in less than a Sunday (maybe four hours if you’re a promising student) and ready to call in debts from the husband, wife, significant other or mother-in-law.

Ready? We’re going to replace a faucet. Here goes:

First, the best one to pick is one you can do without if things get unfortunate. If you’re lucky enough to have two bathrooms or a bath with two sinks, then pick the faucet you use the least often. If not, you can always fall back to washing your hands at the kitchen sink until help arrives, but let us be positive and advance upon the goal with gusto, fervor and a confirmed sense of false security.

Next agenda item: Go shopping. This is the fun part and can, if you wish, include partners, children or admiring onlookers. Keep in mind that like quitting smoking, you will be now be forced to follow through or skulk about sheepishly if you abandon your post amidst the spraying of cold water.

Faucets can be found at the local hardware store (such as our own Berkeley Hardware), the big-box home improvement places (who shall ever remain nameless, except when I get ready to rant) and also at real plumbing suppliers like the fabulous Moran Supply on 40th in Oakland.

Most faucets fall into two classifications, 4-inch spread and 8-inch spread. The standard for bathrooms is 4 inches and this is the distance between the nipples that project downward from the faucet through the sink-top and then tie onto the water supply tubes that come up from the supply valves. If this all sounds a bit jargony, it is and I’ll try to take something for that. I’ll explain more about this later.

Some baths also have what are called wide-spread faucets and these are usually on very old pedestal faucets. If the space between the valves (where the handles stick up) is neither 4 inches nor 8 inches, you might want to get some help. These can be done by determined amateurs but it’s a lot more complex putting all the parts together that allow these several parted things to fit together and bridge the longer distances required on very old sinks (up through the 1940s).

If you’re doing a kitchen sink, it will probably be an 8-inch spread. If you look below the sink, you’ll be able to see the nipples projecting down through the rim of the sink and you can then measure the distance. If you can afford to have the faucet disconnected for a time, the best pre-shopping prep. you can do is to remove the faucet and take it with you. Since you’ll need to do this at some point anyway, let’s look at how that’s done:

First, turn off the water (don’t laugh. You would not be the first person to start doing this and get sprayed in the face having forgotten this, seemingly obvious, step). There are two “shutoff valves” below the sink in most cases and you may have to work hard to get them to turn all the way off. You can test to see how thoroughly they kill the water supply by turning the faucet on and seeing if the water has stopped dripping.

If the shutoffs don’t work well and let a lot of water run through, you may end needing to turn the water off at the front of the house or the street. If you don’t know where your main water shutoff is, it’s time to find out. It’s usually on the front face of the house behind the bushes and sometimes in the crawlspace at the front. Every house is different and you’ll need to figure this out. Some folks end up buying a “water key” that turns the stopcock (don’t start) in the sidewalk 90 degrees to an off position (same as your main gas valve). If you have a main shutoff that allows a very small amount of water to leak past, you can do the faucet replacement with a bucket or bowl catching the slow leak.

The best trip to the store includes taking the shutoff valves, the flexible tubing from them to the faucet and the faucet itself. The best job includes replacement of all of these, since shutoff valves wear out and fill with crud over the years. If you have fairly new shutoffs (ones that shut fully without the strength of our governor), leave them be. The flexible supply lines should be replaced every time and the ones to look for are the “no-burst” type that have a metal weave around the outside. That is, unless you’re looking for that “just flooded” look for your living room (it’s very big this year in certain southern states, I understand).

Make sure to get some help at the store in matching the spread on the faucet nipples, the length of the supply lines and the pipe size of the shutoff valves. If your shutoff valve is newer, it may have a compression fitting at the rear end (an additional nut where it meets the smooth copper pipe). If this is your first time out, leave those alone. If it’s an old valve meeting a threaded-iron fitting, you’re good to go. It’s both easier and also more important.

Here’s an important technical detail. Buy an expensive faucet. First, why would you work this hard to put in a piece of junk that doesn’t look that good, might break during installation and will last fewer years. Just spend another 20-30 bucks and get something nicer. Here’s a secret: The better faucets are easier to install. Price Pfister makes the best low price faucets I’ve seen and I’ve put in dozens of them with virtually no problem. They’re not the only good choice but they are one very good choice.

Oh, yes, back to removing the faucet. This is the hardest nut to crack (sorry). Faucets are mostly held in place with a pair of “basin nuts.” These are under the sink and often in a very hard place to sit and turn a wrench. The nuts are found on the two nipples that descend through the sink holes and are therefore up in this cranny that’s pretty nasty to negotiate. Once you’ve had a look and determined the lay of the land, you may want to start by going to the hardware store and obtaining a “basin wrench.” This odd device has a jaw like a pair of pliers that sits up on the end of a long rod with a handle at the other end. By careful placement, one can put the jawed end on the basin nut and (remember: Lefty Loosey) turn the nut off with one’s hands down well below the sink where turning is viable. This might take holding the tool to figure out but, believe me, it’s a total life-saver. I’ve removed basin nuts with a very small adjustable wrench (often referred to as a Crescent wrench) and tried to make believe I was much smaller than I really am. No fun.

So, you’ve turned off the water, removed the supply lines with a wrench, taken the basin nuts off with a basin wrench and now have all this stuff in your bag (take everything). The reinstallation is basically the same in reverse, only easier. Be sure to use some plumber’s putty below the faucet unless it comes with a rubber seal that fits the surface of your sink very snugly. It’s a common place to leak. Plumbers putty is like Playdough just not as tasty and stays soft way longer.

When you buy your flexible connectors check the ends to make sure the seals are in there. Some types have no rubber seal but if you look at three or four in the bin, you’ll figure it out. Sometimes the seals fall and sometimes people liberate them and put the hose back in the bin. This, in my opinion, should be a capital offense but I may be a bit over-reacting. I do that.

All the water in the house has to be off to replace shutoffs but once they’re installed, you can turn the water in the house back on for the remainder of the procedure. It’s a good idea to flush the valves and piping out into a bucket before installing the faucet. Let’s get the big chunks out.

I also like to clean the nipples out a little before putting the new shutoffs on. Attaching the new valves should be done with TFE paste (which I prefer) or Teflon tape although there are other compounds that do the same thing. You do not need to use this where the flexible water supply line meets the valve or the faucet. The seals do the job.

I question the safety of Teflon when ingested and recommend that you wear some vinyl disposable gloves for this. By the way, for plumbing, those new rubberized cloth gloves (rubber on one side and cloth on the back) are perfect. Protects hands. Increases grip. For the less than mighty, remember that longer wrenches make stronger people. Physics wins out over muscle every time.

Remember how you felt before you learned to drive (I know you don’t drive, Josh). It seemed insurmountable and utterly frightening and now; well now you do it while talking on the phone (bad you). Plumbing is just like that. Go get ‘em tiger.

You old hippies, you probably remember sticking an avocado pit on some arrangement of toothpicks over a jar of water to make it sprout. The tree, if it survived to that stage, made a decent houseplant when it wasn’t turning sickly yellow and dropping leaves and getting all etiolated like a wispy fishing rod because it was stuck in a dark corner and watered too seldom and/or too often by turns and potted in a bucket of backyard clay in the first place and the only fertilizer it ever got was when the cat peed in the pot.

It’s a wonder any of us survived, isn’t it?

Avocado as a species, Persea americana, is a survivor of sorts. Once upon a time it was native here, part of the Neotropical Tertiary geoflora along with others of our favorite gotta-try-it semitropicals and tropicals. We can grow some figs and palms here, and they used to be wildland plants.

Of course, some of us are always pushing the boundaries, planting Buddha’s hand citrons alongside the more rational Meyer lemons. Some of us even get away with growing macadamias. Maybe global warming will let our descendants, if any, grow durians on the San Francisco Archipelago. But avocados are among the group with ancestral rights here.

Time was, this tropical flora had a range extending as far north as the Arctic. The climate here was warmer, wetter than it is now, and the plants that lived here more like what we see farther south along coasts and riversides. Visit Costa Rica, for example, and you’ll see descendants of the trees and greenery whose fossils have turned up in places like Corral Hollow out past Livermore. Coral fossils have turned up near Walnut Creek, a place clearly underwater once and clearly warmer than now, and so have shells of sea critters that now come no closer than the Gulf of California.

Things were drying up a bit in the Miocene, when we had gomphotheres and giraffish camels, sabertoothed not-quite-cats, and hyenalike dogs running around here. The neotropical trees were bearing smaller leaves and beginning their slow retreat southward, and the species that replaced them were tougher about water deprivation.

That didn’t make them better houseplants, just by the way; consider how many live-oaks you’ve seen growing indoors, as opposed to those avocado relics. Most of our houseplants, from the spiderplants to the parlor palm, are tropical in origin, and tough in their own ways. The insides of human houses with or without central heating are still hard places for plants to make a living: dark, dry, weirdly tainted with stuff like natural gas that we animals usually tolerate better than they do.

When you’re cruising guacamole recipes you might run across such oddities as the fact that jaguars like to eat avocados. I suppose I should ask Matt the Cat’s culinary opinion, but he’s hardly of a size to mess with a whole avo, tough hide and all. He’s kind of conservative anyway, not like our long-gone cat Dennis Moore who’d try anything including Doritos. A cat snatching and crunching a Dorito is one of those sights that suggest that we’re all capable of things far beyond what the more sloppy advocates of evolutionary psychology suggest are our fundamental biological boundaries.

What is it with that big seed, anyway? Did avocados co-evolve with after-dinner gardeners for their seed distribution? Most local critters, including those jaguars, are no more capable of swallowing that seed whole and delivering it unscathed to a new home than old Dennis was of dunking a Dorito into guacamole and eating it without getting crumbs and smears all over the place. Avocados have been cultivated into bearing more of that lovely green stuff in their fruits, but the seeds aren’t bigger than their ancestors’.

Back to those gomphotheres. They were elephantine in size and habits, and fat-rich avocado fruits would be gourmet tapas to them. They had fellow herbivores and omnivores jostling them at the buffet, including giant ground sloths like the one whose skeleton was turned up during excavation for the downtown Berkeley BART station. If you’re too dainty for a Shattuck or Telegraph Avenue with a few street people, be grateful you’re not sharing sidewalk space with a fur-clad and probably rarely-bathed mammal that stood 20 feet tall and weighed a few tons. It’s unlikely they ever said, “Please.”

If you have a potted avocado and it’s leaning all over and looking sickly, you have nothing to lose by planting it outdoors somewhere. I knew one on north Berkeley that was regularly mistaken for a big old oak. It’s unlikely but possible that you’ll get good fruit from it; most of those commercial varieties don’t breed true from seed, but that big guy bore avos that were at least as good as a Fuerte. At the least, you’ll get a pretty shade tree, and I can promise you won’t have to worry about attracting giant ground sloths.

Photograph by Ron Sullivan

This great old avocado still lives in North Berkeley, but atrocious pruning is killing it.

“Needle Lace: Borne of Thread and Air” featuring needle lace from the 16th through the 20th centuries. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles, 2982 Adeline St. 843-7290. http://lacismuseum.org

“Wonderland, A Fairytale of the Soviet Monolith” Black and white photographs by Jason Eskenazion. Reception at 5 p.m., artist talk at 6 p.m. at the Graduate School of Journalism, North Gate Hall, UC Campus.

FILM

Girls Will Be Boys “Little Old New York” at 6:30 p.m. and “Queen Christina” at 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Naomi Klein describes “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2701 Harrison St. at 27th. Tickets are $10-$13. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com

Hopkinson Smith, solo lute, “For Pope and King” works of Francesco da Milano and John Dowland at 8 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College at Garber. Tickets are $10-$25. 528-1725. www.sfems.org

Mike Glendinning, guitar, at noon at Cafe Zeste, 1250 Addison St. at Bonar, in the Strawberry Creek Park complex. 704-9378.

Jeremy Cohen and Quartet San Francisco, SoVoSo at 8 p.m. and Paula West, Steve Heckman Quartet at 10 p.m. in at benefit for the Alzheimers Association at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $25-$35. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com

Jeffrey Toobin introduces “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court” at 7:30 p.m. in Chevron Auditorium, International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. Tickets are $5 available from Cody’s. 559-9500.

Gary Braasch describes “Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming is Changing the World” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500.

I think I can’t be Mabel, because I know so many things, and she so little. Besides, I’m I, and she’s she.” Whatever you know—or think you know—about Alice in Wonderland, the Rev. Dodgson’s voyage into the mind of a young girl dropped down a rabbit hole into a dream world of playing cards, mad tea parties and hookah-smoking caterpillars—you’ll be delightfully surprised and newly enlightened by Ragged Wing Ensemble’s completely kinetic staging of Andre Gregory’s (My Dinner with Andre) adaptation (with “the Manhattan Project”—a bid to add Einstein and Oppenheimer to Freud and the Surrealists as Lewis Carroll knock-offs?) at Envision Academy in the Julia Morgan-designed old YWCA building at 1515 Webster in downtown Oakland. It’s going into its last two weekends with a full head of steam, as if the revved-up cast had eaten of the caterpillar’s mushroom and obeyed the tag on the little bottle that reads “Drink Me.”

Escorted upstairs from the atrium lobby (inscribed under the great skylight: “The heavens declare the glory of God/the firmament showeth his handiwork/Day unto day uttereth speech and night/unto night showeth knowledge”—an apt Biblical homily to usher us into the Victorian mindset Alice’s author deranges), the audience is seated on risers leading up to the auditorium stage. The action takes place on the floor of the orchestra and upstairs in the balcony, swirling around, surging forward and back, racing up and down the aisles.

And different spectators will laugh and react at different moments in the action. It’s a strange phenomenon remembered from My Dinner with Andre. There is seldom any unanimity of response, which somehow adds to the giddiness of the performance, lending it the air of being not only an ensemble show but a true group experience, a chain reaction of individuals ignited by the little trouvailles Alice stumbles on, or which trip her up.

Once seated, we hear tango music. A gent (Keith Cory Davis) in a red bow tie, carrying a valise, zips down through the audience from the empty stage behind us to the floor ahead and below to unpack “Alice,” a big rag doll. (Later I heard David Stein, who plays the Red Queen and the frog Footman, among others, refer to the show as “Ragged Alice”). He asks the audience prescriptively to silence cellphones—then, unnerved by echoes of giggling from backstage, begins to manipulate the doll, making Alice herself into a spectator. A chorus (Jacob Basri, Vanessa Godinez, Amalia Korczowski and Hilary Milton) of young interns (Ragged Wing integrates their students into all their shows) bursts into “Jabberwocky,” which quickly syncopates and tersichoreates into hip-hop to stop the clock.

With the skillful direction of Amy Sass (who also directed The Serpent, Ragged Wing’s initial outing a few years back, and has been featured as a very fine performer in the two other shows since), the ensemble expands and contracts in perpetual motion. It takes in every inch of the theatrical space, upstairs and downstairs together, making it breathe, populating it with Carroll’s crazy creatures, and creatively playing out the mind-boggling changes of shape and size that send Alice shooting up through the treetops (where the birds think her a serpent) or shrinking down to a speck on the floor, washed away in a tiny deluge with bitsy crabs, dodos and water mice.

With quick-change costumery (Amy Sass’s design), puppets assembled equally fast (Danny Neece’s) and sometimes combined with human bodies (Anna Shneiderman’s fuming Caterpillar), recited poems (“This poem I am going to recite was written entirely for your benefit,” Humpty Dumpty broadly confides—Shneiderman again, sucking a stogie, the only castmember who keeps “smoking” onstage) and meticulous choreography, Ragged Wing plays the space like an accordion (music by Jasper Patterson) until the building itself seems to be respiring. The action multiplies, doubling, with at first a binocular Alice (the role gets passed around, everybody an Alice, sooner or later). Then, towards the end of the crazy dream, the action unfolds into a kaleidoscope of Alices, all curtsying at curtain call, each the seven-and-a-half year-old voice of Victorian reason, amid the wild phantasmagoric flora and fauna of the brain, that can spawn sea serpents in a little girl’s copious tears or a state of terror from a pack of playing cards.

The script is maybe the best theatrical take on Alice for a contemporary audience, quick and knowing, no preambles or pauses. And Sass’s direction makes it come alive, as each ensemble member pitches in handily, with fine work from Ragged Wing regulars Davis (a truly crazed Mad Hatter and a White Knight beyond the pale), Shneiderman, and Jeffrey Hoffman (who plays a true Dodo and finds the zany core of the White Queen in drag), plus Jennifer Antonacci (a nutty March Hare and scary Duchess), David Stein and Emily Morrison (whose Cheshire Cat brings grins to the audience).

Leaving the resounding old hall becomes as funny as the play, with real life suddenly looking like the mathematician Dodgson’s supposedly concocted nonsense. Ragged Wing has stirred up Alice into quite a froth, as heady as the original—“and yet it was a very clever pudding to invent!”

Subterranean Shakespeare’s CD, Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits (“Two years in the making!”) is something of an instant Berkeley minor classic, what with Michael Rossman (he of the Free Speech Movement) belting out “The Ballad of Tom O’Bedlam” (which Robert Graves and Edith Sitwell both credited to the Bard) or tootling flute on other numbers with The Rude Mechanicals, or funnyman Ed Holmes and poet G. P. Skratz doing up the Scottish Weird Sisters’ “Double, double, toil and trouble” with Andy Dinsmore as World Music. This 17-track wonder features a plethora of local names that have—and haven’t—trod the boards Bardic, in every musical style and sundry. And this coming Monday, Oct. 1, there’ll be a CD release party, 8 p.m. at the Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship Hall, Cedar and Bonita streets. Rossman will croon, Bob Ernst will wail on mouth harp, Tom Waits’ sidekick Mark Growden and his band rave up Will, Michael Peppe do the 129th Sonnet as Wm. Shatner, Ed Holmes get witchy.

The CD itself has much to recommend it, including bites of Orson Welles, Otis Skinner, Gielgud, Sybil Thorndike and Paul Robeson declaiming, to music, as a holiday gift or party background sound. $10 (276-3871 or brownpapertickets.com). www.myspace.com/subshakes (ex-Punk producer Geoffrey Pond, artistic director).

Ten years ago Robert Colescott represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. Rarely was there a solo exhibition at the American pavilion and it was even more amazing that this honor was awarded to an African American painter. The show was very well received and after it closed at the Giardini Publici it travelled to museums in this country and was seen at the Berkeley Museum in 1999.

The current exhibition is a retrospective of the last 10 years. Most of the works have not been shown before. In his painting, George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975), which ridicules the kitschy and overexposed history painting by Emanuel Leutze, it is G.W. Carver, the black peanut farmer in the general’s uniform, who stands up in a boatload full of “darkies,” frolocking in their ride across the river. It was works such as this, which made Colescott into a celebrated artist, who produced expressionist paintings that were simultaneously hilarious and perturbing.

Over time, his work has become more painterly and gestural while retaining their narrative message. What we see in his late work is a weighty manipulation of pigment, the palpitating vitality of paint which is used to tell his stories—some of them about social justice or the lack thereof.

Colsecott was born in Oakland and, after having studied in Paris, came to Berkeley as a student and then as a teacher, but his family’s roots are in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. There is a large work in the show, called Ponchartrain (1997), produced way before Hurricane Katrina, which is imbued with a visualization of jazz. It consists of four congruent panels and has two revolvers aiming at two paint buckets with SEX and RACE written on them. “Sex and race are my raw materials,” he said, “that’s why they’re in the paint pot.” But there is more. In an interview published in the catalogue of this show he also speaks of the essential ideas in his paintings: “cultural/social criticism along with personal/ individual identity” as well as “shapes, color and surfaces.” Robert Colescott’s late paintings show the world and its problems as a great carnival.

Would a neighborhood by any other name still sell as sweet? An entertaining aspect of reading real estate listings in Berkeley has to do with the identification of neighborhoods.

Realtors have a fine-tuned sense of what will attract the interest of prospective buyers. Revering “location, location, location” they attach favored neighborhood names to their listings, often stretching geographical and historical credibility in the process.

Here’s an example. I live in Berkeley’s Le Conte neighborhood. It’s roughly west of Telegraph, south of Dwight, east of Shattuck. No one who lives here, so far as I know, calls it the “Elmwood.” That’s a separate and distinct district centered at Ashby and College blocks to the east. Everyone knows that.

Everyone but realtors and some buyers, that is. For years I’ve picked up house-for-sale flyers to find I live in the “Greater Elmwood,” “Outer Elmwood,” or “Lower Elmwood.” This designation sometimes seemed to extend to homes within honking distance of south Shattuck.

More recently, however, the Le Conte district has acquired its own East Berkeley cachet. We’re sometimes described now as the “Berkeley Bowl Neighborhood.”

But who knows what confusion will ensue when Berkeley Bowl opens their second branch miles west, off Seventh Street, and realtors down there want a piece of the name identification? Will that become “West Berkeley Bowl Neighborhood"? Perhaps “WeBo” for short?

Still, “Elmwood” lingers in places it really hasn’t put down roots. New condominiums on the west side of Telegraph, at the edge of Le Conte, and just a few blocks south of Dwight, were recently marketed as “in the tree-lined Elmwood District.”

Rockridge is the Oakland version of Berkeley’s Elmwood, a district of immensely expandable, and often imaginary, proportions sprawling, in the peculiar geography of realtors, for scores of blocks in all directions. I’ve been told over the years that many Oaklanders have been amused to find that they were living in “The Rockridge” when they actually resided a zip code or two away.

But recently, as gentrification creeps, other North Oakland neighborhoods are reasserting their identity apart from Rockridge. “Temescal” has come into its own and carved out its old zone around the nexus of Telegraph, Claremont, and 51st Street.

Nearby along Telegraph just north of Highway 24 there’s “Idora Park,” the name of a 19th-century beer garden and amusement resort, later subdivided for homes. And a bit further north Berkeley’s “Halcyon Neighborhood” has self-identified in recent years around a new pocket park.

I love the possibility that these names may come to everyday usage, just as the long-lost, pre-annexation name of “Lorin” is increasingly used for the area around the Ashby BART Station. “Lorin District” gives renewed and much needed distinction to a great part of town that, for generations, was regarded as just part of “South Berkeley,” as was “Le Conte” for that matter.

South Berkeley, as you may know, is another name for Where Redevelopment Schemes Go to Revive. Sort of like “North Oakland,” at least the tiny part that’s not “Rockridge.”

Sometimes a great name can undesirably change a neighborhood. Journalist Hunter Thompson once proposed to roll back gentrification in the Rockies by officially changing the name of Aspen, Colorado. The ski and jet set would abandon the town, he argued, if forced to list “Fat City” as an address.

Berkeley neighborhoods are not necessarily exactly defined although some are demarcated with stone entrance pillars, tinted sidewalks, and the like. There are areas where names naturally collide and a certain fluidity of identity is appropriate. Both the Willard neighborhood and the Bateman (around Alta Bates Hospital) district overlap what’s also called Elmwood.

And neighborhood names often evolve. When I moved to Berkeley, many old-timers still called the Telegraph business district and surroundings “Telly.” You rarely hear that now.

That neighborhood then went through a period as the “South Campus” which didn’t sit well with those fretful about university expansion. For the past two decades or so “Southside” seems to have become respectable, although spinning off a few illegitimate offspring along the way.

For example, a condo development on Telegraph several blocks south of Ashby and properly near the edge of the Bateman neighborhood was named “Southside Lofts” a few years back, a geographical misplacement of nearly a mile.

Some neighborhoods never seem to have prominent names. Consider that part of Berkeley north of University Avenue and east of Sacramento Street. It doesn’t seem to have a clear name, as far as I know, although in Realtorese any home there would probably be described as “a few minutes walk from the Gourmet Ghetto.”

Perhaps it will soon be the “Trader Joe’s” neighborhood; move over, Berkeley Bowl.

That same area falls into the “Central Berkeley” classification, an uncomfortable appellation since developers, city staff and councilmembers often translate it to “Central City: Build Big Here.”

Nearby, long-time residents may have found an antidote to upward expansionism by calling their Central Berkeley district, west of old City Hall, “McGee’s Farm” after the homesteader who once owned it. That’s a nomenclatural cow’s kick in the solar plexus to urban density advocates. Build condos in our farm fields, heh?

On the other hand, maybe the McGee Farmers have doomed themselves, since real estate development traditionally destroys the very things it ostensibly honors. Think of all the “Shady Acres” and the like that designate forests of condo towers or fields of sun-struck tract homes.

Evocative names like “Elmwood” and “Rockridge” presumably add panache and attract potential buyers, although their origins may be humble. For example, that’s Rockridge as in the ridge of rock that early Oaklanders revered so much they took away quite a lot of it in quarry operations. And isn’t adjacent “Temescal” something like “Sweat Lodge” in the Olde Tongue?

At least homely East Bay names are still a notch up from San Francisco’s “Cow Hollow” or “Dog Patch.” And we have few, if any, of those colorful East Coast names like “Hell’s Kitchen.” We have to make do with “Gourmet Ghetto” instead, or perhaps “Nut Hill.”

An old Oakland native once told me that the now very chic cleft valley along Highway 13 south of Lake Temescal was colloquially called “Pneumonia Gulch” because the sun entered late and left early, and the fog and chill lingered.

I’m not sure anyone ever used that officially, though. “Pneumonia Gulch Liquors,” for instance, would be a bad business naming decision, although those shopping there would have the assurance that if something went wrong, the ambulance trip wouldn’t be too far to what has long been known as Oakland’s “Pill Hill” neighborhood with its phalanx of hospitals and pharmacists.

Some may remember that after the 1991 hill fire there was a short-lived movement for parts of the Oakland Hills to separate from the city and become a new town named “Tuscany", evoking visions of sun-drenched grapevines rather than rows of charred telephone poles.

And “Oakland Hills"—there’s a term. Where exactly do the “Oakland Hills” end and the “Berkeley Hills” begin? Similarly, can anyone name an undeniably precise line where “Hills” change to “Flatlands”?

It’s all enough to make you want to give up and go home to your own neighborhood. Whatever the realtors are calling it now.

One of the limitations, frustrations, confusions, and overall learning experiences any gardener encounters here is water. Understand that I use “learning experience” as an expletive.

Container gardens are infamous for testing a plant’s tolerances and a planter’s luck and skill with regard to water. Houseplants are chronically overwatered except when they’re underwatered. An overwatered plant can look a lot like a thirsty plant when it’s in the process of succumbing to some wet rot or other. Man, you can’t win.

Outdoor planting here is equally water-weird. A Mediterranean climate like ours has a few salient characteristics, and a prominent one is that it doesn’t rain all summer. This is quite a challenge for a plant trying to make a living: drought during the season when the days are longest and the light to grow by is most abundant.

Look at plants native here, and to other such places like South Africa, coastal Australia and Chile, and of course the coast of the Mediterranean. Lots of them, counting numbers of species as well as populations, are annuals. They start growing as soon as the soil warms and the sun-time increases in spring, flower and reproduce and scatter their tough seeds by midsummer, and die when water gets too scarce.

Perennials including trees get seriously stingy about water. They grow silver or succulent or tough-hided foliage, imbue it with (often fragrant) oils to help retain moisture; they drop their leaves and retreat into wood, like buckeye, or underground storage, like most of our gorgeous bulbs, by summer’s end. If they’re holdouts from a wetter era like redwoods, they learn to sieve water from the ocean fogs and drink that all summer, sustaining their understory neighbors too.

One way to improve your luck is by knowing what your plant is and what its needs and tolerances are. “Tolerance” in plantspeak is some condition—low light, wet or alkaline or heavy soil, wind—a plant doesn’t like but will survive. If you have the plant already, you’ll want to give it what makes it thrive if you can, or at least opt for something it will tolerate. If you have the place and are looking for a plant to put in it, look for one that will like what you have to give.

It’s getting close to planting time for natives (and other Mediterraneans). If you have decent drainage, which for most of us means some slope or berms or lumps in the yard, you can plant natives like Fremontodendron or those bulbs, Calochortus, Brodiaea and the like, that are not only drought-tolerant but drought-demanding. If they get irrigated in summer, they’re susceptible to fungus rots that multiply in warm, moist soils.

There’s the rub: Most garden plants, native or no, need help at least through their first summer. That’s a bit of suspense we just have to endure: is this infant dying of too little water or too much? If you’ve put plants with similar needs together, it’ll be easier to cope with this, to guess whether they’re all thirsty or not.

How? More next week.

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in East Bay Home & Real Estate. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet.

I know you’re out there: you who fear tools. Confirmed abdicators of all things mechanical. Live prey to all members of the Phylum Contractazoa. You who hide in corners until the power is brought back on again by mysterious means. I am here to help but there IS a price. Immersion therapy is not easy but it is simple and you can only change if you really want to change.

The best way to start down the road is to pick one small job and I have just the one. It’s not that complex. You can’t burn down the house and you can’t get shocked. It’s also something that has a good cost savings and a high show-off factor. If all goes moderately well, well have you up and done in less than a Sunday (maybe four hours if you’re a promising student) and ready to call in debts from the husband, wife, significant other or mother-in-law.

Ready? We’re going to replace a faucet. Here goes:

First, the best one to pick is one you can do without if things get unfortunate. If you’re lucky enough to have two bathrooms or a bath with two sinks, then pick the faucet you use the least often. If not, you can always fall back to washing your hands at the kitchen sink until help arrives, but let us be positive and advance upon the goal with gusto, fervor and a confirmed sense of false security.

Next agenda item: Go shopping. This is the fun part and can, if you wish, include partners, children or admiring onlookers. Keep in mind that like quitting smoking, you will be now be forced to follow through or skulk about sheepishly if you abandon your post amidst the spraying of cold water.

Faucets can be found at the local hardware store (such as our own Berkeley Hardware), the big-box home improvement places (who shall ever remain nameless, except when I get ready to rant) and also at real plumbing suppliers like the fabulous Moran Supply on 40th in Oakland.

Most faucets fall into two classifications, 4-inch spread and 8-inch spread. The standard for bathrooms is 4 inches and this is the distance between the nipples that project downward from the faucet through the sink-top and then tie onto the water supply tubes that come up from the supply valves. If this all sounds a bit jargony, it is and I’ll try to take something for that. I’ll explain more about this later.

Some baths also have what are called wide-spread faucets and these are usually on very old pedestal faucets. If the space between the valves (where the handles stick up) is neither 4 inches nor 8 inches, you might want to get some help. These can be done by determined amateurs but it’s a lot more complex putting all the parts together that allow these several parted things to fit together and bridge the longer distances required on very old sinks (up through the 1940s).

If you’re doing a kitchen sink, it will probably be an 8-inch spread. If you look below the sink, you’ll be able to see the nipples projecting down through the rim of the sink and you can then measure the distance. If you can afford to have the faucet disconnected for a time, the best pre-shopping prep. you can do is to remove the faucet and take it with you. Since you’ll need to do this at some point anyway, let’s look at how that’s done:

First, turn off the water (don’t laugh. You would not be the first person to start doing this and get sprayed in the face having forgotten this, seemingly obvious, step). There are two “shutoff valves” below the sink in most cases and you may have to work hard to get them to turn all the way off. You can test to see how thoroughly they kill the water supply by turning the faucet on and seeing if the water has stopped dripping.

If the shutoffs don’t work well and let a lot of water run through, you may end needing to turn the water off at the front of the house or the street. If you don’t know where your main water shutoff is, it’s time to find out. It’s usually on the front face of the house behind the bushes and sometimes in the crawlspace at the front. Every house is different and you’ll need to figure this out. Some folks end up buying a “water key” that turns the stopcock (don’t start) in the sidewalk 90 degrees to an off position (same as your main gas valve). If you have a main shutoff that allows a very small amount of water to leak past, you can do the faucet replacement with a bucket or bowl catching the slow leak.

The best trip to the store includes taking the shutoff valves, the flexible tubing from them to the faucet and the faucet itself. The best job includes replacement of all of these, since shutoff valves wear out and fill with crud over the years. If you have fairly new shutoffs (ones that shut fully without the strength of our governor), leave them be. The flexible supply lines should be replaced every time and the ones to look for are the “no-burst” type that have a metal weave around the outside. That is, unless you’re looking for that “just flooded” look for your living room (it’s very big this year in certain southern states, I understand).

Make sure to get some help at the store in matching the spread on the faucet nipples, the length of the supply lines and the pipe size of the shutoff valves. If your shutoff valve is newer, it may have a compression fitting at the rear end (an additional nut where it meets the smooth copper pipe). If this is your first time out, leave those alone. If it’s an old valve meeting a threaded-iron fitting, you’re good to go. It’s both easier and also more important.

Here’s an important technical detail. Buy an expensive faucet. First, why would you work this hard to put in a piece of junk that doesn’t look that good, might break during installation and will last fewer years. Just spend another 20-30 bucks and get something nicer. Here’s a secret: The better faucets are easier to install. Price Pfister makes the best low price faucets I’ve seen and I’ve put in dozens of them with virtually no problem. They’re not the only good choice but they are one very good choice.

Oh, yes, back to removing the faucet. This is the hardest nut to crack (sorry). Faucets are mostly held in place with a pair of “basin nuts.” These are under the sink and often in a very hard place to sit and turn a wrench. The nuts are found on the two nipples that descend through the sink holes and are therefore up in this cranny that’s pretty nasty to negotiate. Once you’ve had a look and determined the lay of the land, you may want to start by going to the hardware store and obtaining a “basin wrench.” This odd device has a jaw like a pair of pliers that sits up on the end of a long rod with a handle at the other end. By careful placement, one can put the jawed end on the basin nut and (remember: Lefty Loosey) turn the nut off with one’s hands down well below the sink where turning is viable. This might take holding the tool to figure out but, believe me, it’s a total life-saver. I’ve removed basin nuts with a very small adjustable wrench (often referred to as a Crescent wrench) and tried to make believe I was much smaller than I really am. No fun.

So, you’ve turned off the water, removed the supply lines with a wrench, taken the basin nuts off with a basin wrench and now have all this stuff in your bag (take everything). The reinstallation is basically the same in reverse, only easier. Be sure to use some plumber’s putty below the faucet unless it comes with a rubber seal that fits the surface of your sink very snugly. It’s a common place to leak. Plumbers putty is like Playdough just not as tasty and stays soft way longer.

When you buy your flexible connectors check the ends to make sure the seals are in there. Some types have no rubber seal but if you look at three or four in the bin, you’ll figure it out. Sometimes the seals fall and sometimes people liberate them and put the hose back in the bin. This, in my opinion, should be a capital offense but I may be a bit over-reacting. I do that.

All the water in the house has to be off to replace shutoffs but once they’re installed, you can turn the water in the house back on for the remainder of the procedure. It’s a good idea to flush the valves and piping out into a bucket before installing the faucet. Let’s get the big chunks out.

I also like to clean the nipples out a little before putting the new shutoffs on. Attaching the new valves should be done with TFE paste (which I prefer) or Teflon tape although there are other compounds that do the same thing. You do not need to use this where the flexible water supply line meets the valve or the faucet. The seals do the job.

I question the safety of Teflon when ingested and recommend that you wear some vinyl disposable gloves for this. By the way, for plumbing, those new rubberized cloth gloves (rubber on one side and cloth on the back) are perfect. Protects hands. Increases grip. For the less than mighty, remember that longer wrenches make stronger people. Physics wins out over muscle every time.

Remember how you felt before you learned to drive (I know you don’t drive, Josh). It seemed insurmountable and utterly frightening and now; well now you do it while talking on the phone (bad you). Plumbing is just like that. Go get ‘em tiger.

Inauguration of the New Rosie-the-Riveter National Park in Richmond, with events Fri.- Sun. For more information call 232-5050. www.homefrontfestival.com

Bike Tour of Berkeley Worker Cooperatives Meet at 5:15 p.m. at the Downtown Berkeley BART station for a 1.5 hour tour with guided tours of the Missing Link bike shop, Cheese Board pizza & cheese shop and Nabalom Bakery. The bike ride will also include stops by the Juice Bar, Mayback High School and the Berkeley Free Clinic. For more information see www.nobawc.org/conference

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Lori Fogarty on the development plans for the Oakland Museum of California. Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. 526-2925.

Free Compost for Berkeley Residents from 8:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. at Berkeley Marina Maintenance Yard, 201 University Ave. First priority is given to Berkeley Unified School District and Berkeley Community Gardens. Please complete sign-in log before loading compost. 644-6566.

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310.

Magicians David Hirata and Kim Silverman at 6:30 p.m. at Kinnel Hall, Lutheran Church of the Cross, 1744 University Ave. Tickets are $15-$25 sliding scale, children under 14 free. Includes dinner. For reservations call 704-7729.

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.

SUNDAY, SEPT. 30

How Berkeley Can You Be? Parade up University Ave. at 11 a.m. with ArtCars, community groups and more, followed by a festival in Civic Center Park with live music, food and craft booths to 5 p.m. www.howberkeley.com

Out and About in Rockridge Live music, craft and community booths and children’s activities from noon to 6 p.m. along College Ave. from Alcatraz to Broadway. 604-3125. www.rockridgedistrict.com

Working with Wool Learn how the spinning wheel turns wool into yarn, try a drop spindle and make a felt ball, from 1 to 2:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233.

Halcyon Commons Community Potluck with live music at Halcyon Court at Prince St., from 5 to 7:30 p.m. 849-1969.

“Nightmare Beyond Borders” The Iraqi Displacement Crisis and What Can Be Done To Stop It with Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi political analyst and consultant to AFSC's Iraq Program, at 3 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Church, 1600 Sacramento St. 415-565-0201, ext. 24. www.afsc.org/iraq/tour

"An Unreasonable Man” The documentary about Ralph Nader at 2 p.m. at the Hillside Community Church, 1422 Navellier St., El Cerrito, between Potrero and Moeser. Tickets are $8. 526-0972.

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit Tilden. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233.

“What Islam, Whose Islam? The Struggle for Women’s Rights within a Religious Framework & the Experience of Sisters in Islam” with Zainah Anwar, Executive Director, Sisters in Islam, Malaysia, at 4 p.m. in the Home Room, International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. Co-sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for South Asian Studies.

“Reese Erlich Day” Benefit Dinner at 7:30 p.m. at Saigon Restaurant, 326 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. Cost is $50 per person or $80 per couple and includes one copy of the book “The Iran Agenda” and a CD of the new “Making Contact” radio documentary. RSVP to 251-1332, ext. 105.

“Reincarnation and Buddhism” A series of three talks with Reverend Harry Bridge, Lodi Buddhist Temple, on Oct. 2, 16, and 30 at 7 p.m. at the Jodo Shinshu Center, 2140 Durant Ave. at Fulton St. Cost is $20 for the series. 809-1460.

Berkeley High School Governance Council meets to discuss proposed changes to the bylaws and the advisory plan, at 4:15 p.m. in the Community Theater Lobby. 644-4803.

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122.

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830.

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 3

Walking Tour of Oakland City Center Meet at 10 a.m. in front Oakland City Hall at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234.

El Sabor de Fruitvale with a farmers’ market, bilingual storytelling with puppets, face painting, free books for children and information on community services from 3 to 7 p.m. at Fruitvale Village Plaza, 3411 East 12th St., Oakland. 535-6900. www.unitycouncil.org

“The Revolt Against Consumerism” Author and journalist Tim Holt will speak on the Hillside Movement at 6 p.m. at the North Berkeley Branch Library, 1170 The Alameda at Hopkins. 981-6250.

“The Darwin Awards” a film comedy, at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $5. 843-8724.

Friends of Albany Library Membership Meeting with a celebration of the publication of “Images of America: Albany” by Karen Sorensen at 7:30 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720.

“Bella Bella” A film by Elizabeth Sher premiers at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center, Live Oak Park, followed by a discussion with the filmmaker and the Sculptor Bella Feldman. Tickets are $8-$10. 644.6893.

“Home Movies: Autobiographical Films by Women” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

READINGS AND LECTURES

Poetry Flash with Willis Barnstone and Steven Nightengale at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College auditorium, 2050 Center St. 525-5476.

“Needle Lace: Borne of Thread and Air” featuring needle lace from the 16th through the 20th centuries. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles, 2982 Adeline St. 843-7290. http://lacismuseum.org

“Wonderland, A Fairytale of the Soviet Monolith” Black and white photographs by Jason Eskenazion. Reception at 5 p.m., artist talk at 6 p.m. at the Graduate School of Journalism, North Gate Hall, UC Campus.

FILM

Girls Will Be Boys “Little Old New York” at 6:30 p.m. and “Queen Christina” at 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Naomi Klein describes “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2701 Harrison St. at 27th. Tickets are $10-$13. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com

Hopkinson Smith, solo lute, “For Pope and King” works of Francesco da Milano and John Dowland at 8 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College at Garber. Tickets are $10-$25. 528-1725. www.sfems.org

Mike Glendinning, guitar, at noon at Cafe Zeste, 1250 Addison St. at Bonar, in the Strawberry Creek Park complex. 704-9378.

The title character of Berkeley native Eisa Davis’ Pulitzer Prize-nominated play Bulrusher, as produced by the Shotgun Players at the Ashby Stage, says, “I guess I can tell everybody else’s future because I don’t know my own past ... didn’t die like I was supposed to, so I’ve got a one-way ticket to the Land of Could Be.”

She tells of her special provenance: abandoned as an infant, discovered floating in a basket among cat-tails in the Navarro River (thus, Bulrusher, like Moses—but also “foundling, illegitimate child” in Boontling, the old backdoor lingo of Boonville in Mendocino County), she’s carved out a niche for herself, first as a clairvoyant who “reads the water,” then as a fruit peddler, plying oranges and bananas, the only “piece of cut cabbage” (Boontling for black woman) in town.

But another, like her in race and gender, though from another world, arrives alone from Birmingham, Ala.—and upsets the apple cart, both for lonely Bulrusher and for the other denizens of Anderson Valley and the webwork of secret kinships left unspoken in Bootling as well as plain English.

Eisa Davis, who commented that her play was “a feat of the imagination,” has created a Romance—with a capital R—which, like The Scarlet Letter, uses the romances between characters in an idyllic setting to mirror their personal secrets, which in turn reflect, upside-down, the image of the greater world, outside and far away, with all its tribulation and strife—in particular, questions of race, family and identity, all being defined and redefined in the courts, schools and streets of the America of 1955, when the play is set.

It opens on Lisa Clark’s great set of plank floors for cabins and town buildings rising out of the river waters, interlaced with reeds and overhung by big trees, with Bulrusher (Kirya Traber, a spoken word artist and Mendocino native) in an emerald dress, catching the drip from the branches in her skirt and tossing it back up in a shaft of light, then talking to the river, her “diary, church, everything,” and the redwoods overhead, rhapsodizing in words derived from a song Davis wrote: “Forgiveness is an insect that may one day draw my blood ... I am born into a new language.”

Then an odd trio, a kind of triangle, is introduced under a milk glass chandelier hanging from an arch become a tree trunk, in the parlor of the town’s cathouse: Madame (Louise Chegwidden—“Not a businesswoman like Mary Magdalene!”) banters with two men, also named only by occupation—silent Schoolch (Terry Lamb), former teacher and (at first) mute straightman with a china cup and saucer and laconic glance and gestures, and the loquacious Logger (D. Anthony Harper), Boonville’s only black man, who stayed on when the sawmills gave way to orchards (which in turn have given way to the present sprawl of vineyards). “This woman’s an art-i-san!” says the Logger of Madame.

The Logger found Bulrusher floating in her basket; Schoolch brought her up. And now she’s being pursued by Boy (Cole Smith), who declares her his girlfriend in sanguine flights of amorous oratory directed at her. (Madame, Logger and Boy in particular speak in the lapidary diction, peppered with Boontling argot, that give Bulrusher much of its lyrical, even rhapsodic, quality.)

Then enter Vera (Jahmela Biggs), on foot from the nearest Greyhound stop, arriving “on the day of the only rain of the summer.” (“It’s pearlin’ out there!” exclaims Madame in Boontling.) She and Bulrusher are amazed at each other. “You never seen another colored girl before?”—“No,” Bulrusher admits, “I had to drink a beer to get over you!”

Vera, like Odysseus walking inland with an oar over his shoulder, seems both shocked and glad Bulrusher doesn’t know the real score of race in America. But Vera has her own reasons for fleeing to Boonville; the Logger is her uncle, and Vera’s stunned: “I never thought I’d see a town full of crackers let a buck in their bordello!” The Logger sets her straight: “Indians, they’re the colored folk here now—and they got it bad, so don’t you go saying you’re part Cherokee!”

The Logger takes her in, braids her sopping hair, recites Paul Laurence Dunbar poems, talks about “tongue and groovin’ my own cabin” and ironically laments, “All the trees are gone, and so is my youth. I got nothin’ to destroy.”

There are many images and vignettes: Bulrusher in gumboots with a kerchief on her head, holding a highgun (shotgun); Logger cutting in on Schootch to dance with Madame at the Apple Show dance, while Boy finally holds Bulrusher, at least for a slow number, after he calls a square dance. And Bulrusher goes on a quest to meet her penitent mother; the Romance becomes a family romance.

A family romance in a small town with its own jargon, tucked away in a valley of redwoods, while the wheels of change grind in the greater world outside—and everything goes round and round in Boonville ... so much, Bulrusher says, “Wait till I tell the river!”

Ellen Sebastian Chang and Margot Hall have directed their well-cast company with both sensitivity and alacrity. The characters are crystal-clear, assisted by Valera Cobble’s costuming, and the three Equity actors (Chegwidden, Harper and Lamb) anchor the show solidly with their wry triangle. Jarrod Fischer’s lighting captures the liquid light and shadow of the north coast. Berkeley composer Clark Suprynowicz designed the sound and led a ten-player ensemble, playing bass and washboard himself, to record the superlative incidental music, wonderful motifs that shade the edges of theatrical tableaux.

Bulrusher is a quiet triumph—for Shotgun, who show how they’re advancing a kind of housestyle of production—and for Eisa Davis, who commented, “I discovered what my themes are as a writer, what archetypes populate my landscape.” One of the themes is stated by the title archetype, Bulrusher the outcast: “Don’t judge people by what never happened!”

BULRUSHER

Presented at 8 p.m. Thursday-Sunday by the Shotgun Players through Oct. 28 at the Asbhy Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. $17-$25.

“If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filling dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.”

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti,

from the opening of

Poetry as Insurgent Art

(to be given away by Moe’s as a

broadside at the Oct. 2 reading)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, famed Beat poet, publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s notorious Howl and proprietor of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco’s North Beach, will read from his new and ongoing “ars poetica,” Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions), 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2 at Moe’s Books at 2476 Telegraph Ave. Admission is free.

“We’re happy Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s going to cross the Bay to read at Moe’s,” said Owen Hill, organizer of the Moe’s reading series. “He hasn’t read in Berkeley for a while, and I was told that the only other Bay Area reading from his new book will be at his own store. I think it’s fitting he’ll be reading here, on Telegraph, across from the Cafe Med, where Ginsberg reputedly wrote part of Howl, and at Moe’s, the other literary gathering place besides City Lights. He’s said he’s eager to read here, to support another independent bookstore—and Moe’s, like City Lights, has managed to survive a long time.”

Ferlinghetti, a native of Yonkers, N.Y., served as a naval officer during World War II, later crediting his longtime pacifist beliefs to witnessing the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki as a member of the occupation force there. After attending Columbia in New York and the Sorbonne in Paris on the G.I. Bill, Ferlinghetti moved to San Francisco, at the urging of Kenneth Rexroth, whom he had met in Paris.

In 1953, City Lights Bookstore, the first all-paperback store in the U.S., was opened by Ferlinghetti and Pete Martin, known for his deadpan wit, who had published a magazine of the same name, after Chaplin’s film title. Two years later, Martin went back to New York, and Ferlinghetti started the press, and its Pocket Poets series, which leapt into the news in 1956, with the impounding of Howl, published shortly after its premiere at the famed 6 Gallery reading, for obscenity and its successful courtroom defense. His own popular books, Pictures of the Gone World and A Coney Island of the Mind, came out in 1955 and ‘58, respectively, which helped define Beat poetry and sensibility, and which launched a career that has seen over 30 books published.

In 1994, an alley in North Beach was named in Ferlinghetti’s honor. He was declared Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 1998, and in 2000 received a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle. He continues to work at City Lights, to write and to paint and exhibit.

Of his book Poetry as Insurgent Art, Ferlinghetti has written, “After a lifetime, this (r)evolutionary little book is still a work-in-progress, the poet’s ars poetica, to which at 88 he is constantly adding. The earliest version ... was transcribed from a KPFA (FM) broadcast by the author in the late 1950s.”

Moe’s Books will host an event tonight (Tuesday) at 7:30 p.m. to celebrate the publication of Viz Interarts: Event, A Trans-Genre Anthology with readings by Laura Moriarty, who teaches at Mills College and helps direct Small Press Distribution; haiku poet and teacher Gary Gach; writer, editor and publisher Mary Burger and spoken word artist and Sister Spit promoter Michelle Tea. The anthology’s 250 large-format illustrated pages contain writers and artists such as Dadaist Tristan Tzara, the late Objectivist poet Carl Rakosi (whose poem is collaged by Anne Waldman), George Hitchcock of Kayak, well-known Beat and New York School poets, Situationists and Fluxus artists, Language poets and well-known Bay Area poets and writers of the present, like Michael Palmer, Norma Cole and Joanne Kyger.

You old hippies, you probably remember sticking an avocado pit on some arrangement of toothpicks over a jar of water to make it sprout. The tree, if it survived to that stage, made a decent houseplant when it wasn’t turning sickly yellow and dropping leaves and getting all etiolated like a wispy fishing rod because it was stuck in a dark corner and watered too seldom and/or too often by turns and potted in a bucket of backyard clay in the first place and the only fertilizer it ever got was when the cat peed in the pot.

It’s a wonder any of us survived, isn’t it?

Avocado as a species, Persea americana, is a survivor of sorts. Once upon a time it was native here, part of the Neotropical Tertiary geoflora along with others of our favorite gotta-try-it semitropicals and tropicals. We can grow some figs and palms here, and they used to be wildland plants.

Of course, some of us are always pushing the boundaries, planting Buddha’s hand citrons alongside the more rational Meyer lemons. Some of us even get away with growing macadamias. Maybe global warming will let our descendants, if any, grow durians on the San Francisco Archipelago. But avocados are among the group with ancestral rights here.

Time was, this tropical flora had a range extending as far north as the Arctic. The climate here was warmer, wetter than it is now, and the plants that lived here more like what we see farther south along coasts and riversides. Visit Costa Rica, for example, and you’ll see descendants of the trees and greenery whose fossils have turned up in places like Corral Hollow out past Livermore. Coral fossils have turned up near Walnut Creek, a place clearly underwater once and clearly warmer than now, and so have shells of sea critters that now come no closer than the Gulf of California.

Things were drying up a bit in the Miocene, when we had gomphotheres and giraffish camels, sabertoothed not-quite-cats, and hyenalike dogs running around here. The neotropical trees were bearing smaller leaves and beginning their slow retreat southward, and the species that replaced them were tougher about water deprivation.

That didn’t make them better houseplants, just by the way; consider how many live-oaks you’ve seen growing indoors, as opposed to those avocado relics. Most of our houseplants, from the spiderplants to the parlor palm, are tropical in origin, and tough in their own ways. The insides of human houses with or without central heating are still hard places for plants to make a living: dark, dry, weirdly tainted with stuff like natural gas that we animals usually tolerate better than they do.

When you’re cruising guacamole recipes you might run across such oddities as the fact that jaguars like to eat avocados. I suppose I should ask Matt the Cat’s culinary opinion, but he’s hardly of a size to mess with a whole avo, tough hide and all. He’s kind of conservative anyway, not like our long-gone cat Dennis Moore who’d try anything including Doritos. A cat snatching and crunching a Dorito is one of those sights that suggest that we’re all capable of things far beyond what the more sloppy advocates of evolutionary psychology suggest are our fundamental biological boundaries.

What is it with that big seed, anyway? Did avocados co-evolve with after-dinner gardeners for their seed distribution? Most local critters, including those jaguars, are no more capable of swallowing that seed whole and delivering it unscathed to a new home than old Dennis was of dunking a Dorito into guacamole and eating it without getting crumbs and smears all over the place. Avocados have been cultivated into bearing more of that lovely green stuff in their fruits, but the seeds aren’t bigger than their ancestors’.

Back to those gomphotheres. They were elephantine in size and habits, and fat-rich avocado fruits would be gourmet tapas to them. They had fellow herbivores and omnivores jostling them at the buffet, including giant ground sloths like the one whose skeleton was turned up during excavation for the downtown Berkeley BART station. If you’re too dainty for a Shattuck or Telegraph Avenue with a few street people, be grateful you’re not sharing sidewalk space with a fur-clad and probably rarely-bathed mammal that stood 20 feet tall and weighed a few tons. It’s unlikely they ever said, “Please.”

If you have a potted avocado and it’s leaning all over and looking sickly, you have nothing to lose by planting it outdoors somewhere. I knew one on north Berkeley that was regularly mistaken for a big old oak. It’s unlikely but possible that you’ll get good fruit from it; most of those commercial varieties don’t breed true from seed, but that big guy bore avos that were at least as good as a Fuerte. At the least, you’ll get a pretty shade tree, and I can promise you won’t have to worry about attracting giant ground sloths.

Photograph by Ron Sullivan

This great old avocado still lives in North Berkeley, but atrocious pruning is killing it.

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit Point Pinole. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233.

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577.

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122.

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991.

Birding with the Golden Gate Audubon Society at Lake Merritt Meet at 9:30 a.m. at the large spherical cage near Nature Center at Perkins and Bellevue. 834-1066.

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Colloquium with Alexi Yurchak on “Transformations of Space in Post-Socialist St. Petersburg” at 1 p.m. at Wurster Hall, Room 315A, UC Campus. All welcome. laep.ced.berkeley.edu/events/colloquium

Transportation for the Future: Getting Around without a Car at 1:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 548-9696.

“East Bay Clean Energy: How You Can Support Community Choice Energy” Learn how communities can assume greater control over energy pricing and invest in renewable energy, at 6:30 p.m. at Bay Area Academy, 2201 Broadway, Suite 100, Oakland. 925-255-3110. EastBayCCA@gmail.com

“Adapting to the Impacts of a Changing Climate” Learn and share ideas about what we can do as a community to deal with the impacts of global warming at 7:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5434. energy@ci.berkeley.ca.us www.cityofberkeley.info/sustainable/

Seldom Seen Acting Company Homeless actors share their life stories at 10:30 a.m. at St. Vincent de Paul Center, 2272 San Pablo Ave., Oakland. 636-4255.

Writer Coach Connection Volunteers needed to help Berkeley students improve their writing and critical thinking skills from noon to 3 p.m. or from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. To register call 524-2319. www.writercoachconnection.org

“Loving Maradona” A film on the Argentine soccer player at 7 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $6. 849-2568. www.lapena.org

“Stories of the Buddha Dharma” with Rev. Ken Yamada at 7 p.m. at the Jodo Shinshu Center, 2140 Durant Ave. at Fulton. Cost is $15. 809-1460.

“After Capitalism: An Integrated Vision for a New World” with Dada Maheshvarananda at 7 p.m. at Green City Gallery, 1950 Shattuck Ave. Donation $10-$20.

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. 548-9840.

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/

“How Does Immigration Work in the Bay Area?” with Rosemary Langley Mellville of the U.C. Citizenship and Immigration Services, at 5 p.m. at Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Sponsored by the League of Women Voters. 843-8824.

“Numbers in the Courtroom: Statistics as Evidence” Learn how statistics can be used to help a court decide if a company has illegally discriminated against an employee with William Lepowsky, Mathematics Instructor at Laney College and statistical expert witness, from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in Room G-209 at Laney College, 8th and Fallon Streets, Oakland, free. 464-3181.

“Sentenced Home” A screening of the documentary and a panel discussion on the overlap between criminal justice and and immigration policy at 4 p.m. at Boalt Hall, Room 100, UC Campus. 643-7025.

“Iran, North Korea, and the Dream of a Nuclear Weapon Free World” wth Tad Daley at 7:30 p.m. in the Home Room, International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. Cost is $5. 642-9460.

“Covering California: Media and Democracy in the Golden State” The annual conference of the Travers Program in Ethics & Accountability in Government will feature speakers and panels on the interrelationships between the news media and democracy. Thurs. and Fri. from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Barrows Hall, UC Campus. 642-6323. http://polisci.berkeley.edu/department/calendar/index.asp

“Exilio: Creating Home Away from Home” Chilean art, music and poetry Thurs. and Fri. at 7 p.m. at La Peña. 849-2568. www.lapena.org

Bayswater Book Club meets to discuss “The Secret Team” by L. Fletcher Prouty at 6:30 p.m. Call for location. 433-2911.

Meet a Humane Society Dog for ages 5 and up at 4 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043.

Inauguration of the New Rosie-the-Riveter National Park in Richmond, with events Fri.- Sun. For more information call 232-5050. www.homefrontfestival.com

Bike Tour of Berkeley Worker Cooperatives Meet at 5:15 p.m. at the Downtown Berkeley BART station for a 1.5 hour tour with guided tours of the Missing Link bike shop, Cheese Board pizza & cheese shop and Nabalom Bakery. The bike ride will also include stops by the Juice Bar, Mayback High School and the Berkeley Free Clinic. For more information see www.nobawc.org/conference

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Lori Fogarty on the development plans for the Oakland Museum of California. Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. 526-2925.

Free Compost for Berkeley Residents from 8:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. at Berkeley Marina Maintenance Yard, 201 University Ave. First priority is given to Berkeley Unified School District and Berkeley Community Gardens. Please complete sign-in log before loading compost. 644-6566.

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310.

Magicians David Hirata and Kim Silverman at 6:30 p.m. at Kinnel Hall, Lutheran Church of the Cross, 1744 University Ave. Tickets are $15-$25 sliding scale, children under 14 free. Includes dinner. For reservations call 704-7729.

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.

SUNDAY, SEPT. 30

How Berkeley Can You Be? Parade up University Ave. at 11 a.m. with ArtCars, community groups and more, followed by a festival in Civic Center Park with live music, food and craft booths to 5 p.m. www.howberkeley.com

Out and About in Rockridge Live music, craft and community booths and children’s activities from noon to 6 p.m. along College Ave. from Alcatraz to Broadway. 604-3125. www.rockridgedistrict.com

Working with Wool Learn how the spinning wheel turns wool into yarn, try a drop spindle and make a felt ball, from 1 to 2:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233.

Halcyon Commons Community Potluck with live music at Halcyon Court at Prince St., from 5 to 7:30 p.m. 849-1969.

“Nightmare Beyond Borders” The Iraqi Displacement Crisis and What Can Be Done To Stop It with Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi political analyst and consultant to AFSC's Iraq Program, at 3 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Church, 1600 Sacramento St. 415-565-0201, ext. 24. www.afsc.org/iraq/tour

"An Unreasonable Man” The documentary about Ralph Nader at 2 p.m. at the Hillside Community Church, 1422 Navellier St., El Cerrito, between Potrero and Moeser. Tickets are $8. 526-0972.